Traction Control on Loose Soil for a Redundantly Actuated Mobile Robot

• Published in: Intelligent Robotics and Applications pp. 1155 - 1164
• Main Authors: Lei, Zhenwu, Cui, Pingyuan, Ju, Hehua, Peng, Xingwen
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin, Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: force distribution; traction control; wheeled mobile robot
• ISBN: 9783540885122; 3540885129
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-88513-9_123

In this paper, a novel traction control scheme for a mobile robot with six independent driven wheels on loose soil is presented. First, a robust model-based slide mode controller is designed to estimate the traction force Fx, Fy and steering moment Mz for executing a desired motion of the robot body. Because of actuation redundancy, the degree of freedom of task space is lower than the number of wheel drive variables, the paper uses an improved pseudo-inverse matrix to compute the tractive forces of the redundant drive wheels. In view of each wheel’s slip behavior on loose soil, a slip compensation term is developed to correct the output of slide mode controller. The simulations show clearly the advantage of the traction control versus traditional kinematic control.