RACbot-RT: Robust Digital Control for Differential Soccer-player Robots

In the field of robot soccer, mobile robots must exhibit high responsiveness to motion commands and possess precise pose control. This article presents a digital controller for pose stability convergence, developed to small-sized soccer robots. Special emphasis has been put on the design of a generic controller, which is suitable for any mobile robot with differential kinematics. The proposed approach incorporates adaptive control to deal with modeling errors and a Kalman filter which fuses odometry and vision to obtain an accurate pose estimation. Experimental results are shown to validate the quality of the proposed controller.