One of the most important reasons for the popularity of mobile robots in industrial manufacturing is their capability to move and operate freely. In order for the robots to perform to the expectations in manufacturing, their position and orientation must be determined accurately. In addition, there is a strong tendency to grant more autonomy to robots when they operate in hazardous or unknown e...

Designing the self-balancing two-wheeled mobile robots and reducing undesired vibrations are of great importance. For this purpose, the majority of researches are focused on application of relatively complex control approaches without improving the robot structure. Therefore, in this paper we introduce a new two-wheeled mobile robot which, despite its relative simple structure, fulfills the req...

The stability of the internal dynamics of a wheeled mobile robot is analyzed. It is shown that the wheeled mobile robot exhibits unstable internal dynamics when moving backwards. Most control methods of wheeled mobile robots are designed based on input-output relations. Since the internal dynamics are not represented in input-output relations, stability properties of the internal dynamics are g...

In this paper, the stable full-state tracking problem is investigated for nonholonomic wheeled mobile robots under output-tracking control laws. Dynamics of such wheeled mobile robots are nonholonomic and pose challenging problems for control design and stability analysis. The dynamics formulated in terms of full-state tracking errors offer some properties that allow better understanding of the...

The paper considers a specific class of wheeled mobile robots referred to as mobile wheeled pendulums (MWP). Robots pertaining to this class are composed of two wheels rotating about a central body. The main feature of the MWP pertains to the central body, which can rotate about the wheel axes. As such motion is undesirable, the problem of the stabilization of the central body in MWP is crucial...

We report here on a new technique to evaluate autonomous mobile robots built for exploring rugged terrain such as is found on planetary surfaces. The dynamics of both wheeled and legged robots interacting with deformable soil (sand) and obstacles are notoriously complex and nonlinear. This paper introduces a novel statistical methodology for the evaluation of such robots. We report on work in p...