Control of Differential Wheel Mobile Robot

Abstract

The differential drive mobile robot is one of the robots which is commonly used in the robotics field due to it is ease of control relatively to the other type of the mobile robots. The system main parts are two wheels with a DC motor for each one, with a third Omni wheel to keep the balance of the robot, infrared sensors, encoders, and the controller. In this system the angular velocity of the system is controlled using a PID controller while the translational velocity is kept constant. A go to goal and avoid obstacles behaviors were used in the controller to navigate the around environment and reach the goal location. The infrared sensors mapped the area around the robot and the encoder used to update the system location, the updated location and the goal location are used to calculate an orientation vector towards the goal location. This vector changes whenever the current location of the robot changes the PID controller minimize the error between the desired angular velocity and the current angular velocity. In this research, a mathematical model for the system was driven. The system response was captured using a based robot simulator Sim.i.am. A PID algorithm was implemented in the avoid obstacle and go to goal behavior to minimize the error between the desired angular velocity and the current angular velocity and then the PID send the translational velocity that have been calculated in the controller to achieve the desired angular velocity for the robot to each motor of the two wheels. The MATLAB Sim.i.am simulator was used to simulate the physical world and the response of the robot when it is applying the avoid obstacle and go to goal behavior and when it was tracked by another robot