11. Automated Kinematics Reasoning for Wheeled Mobile Robots

Control schemes for wheeled mobile robots typically assume a specific mobility capability of a drive and implicitly use the drive’s kinematics within its control procedures. This makes it difficult to deal with faults in the drive and to handle drives with diverse geometry and functionality that might even change during operation of a robot. As a consequence, we propose a model-based control scheme that builds upon an automated analysis of a robotic drive and on an on-line deduction of the drive’s kinematics. We achieve this functionality through (1) the introduction of steering-angle independent, generalized variants of the rolling and sliding constraints for wheeled mobile robots and (2) the corresponding reformulation of kinematic analysis. This leads to a computationally efficient algorithm that deduces the (inverse) kinematics of a drive for its mode of operation or failure. Fault tolerant and robust behavior, however, is only one aspect of our control architecture. On-line kinematics analysis enables us to easily handle robots that change in geometry or functionality such as self-configuring modular robot systems and teams of cooperative robots.