Over the last few years there have been great developments and improvements in the mobile robotics field, oriented to replace human operators especially in dangerous tasks, such as mine-sweeping operations, rescuing after earthquakes or other catastrophic events, fire-fighting operations, working inside nuclear power stations and exploration of unknown environments. Different locomotion systems...

This paper deals with the structure of the kinematic models of wheeled mobile robots (WMR). A wheeled mobile robot here considered as a planer rigid body that rides on an arbitrary number of wheels. In this paper it is shown that, for a large class of possible configurations of wheels, five types of configurations can be done namely i) fixed standard wheels, ii) steerable standard wheels, iii) ...

Due to various advantages of Wheeled Mobile Robots (WMRs), many researchers have focused to solve their challenges. The automatic motion control of such robots is an attractive problem and is one of the issues which should carefully be examined. In the current paper, the trajectory tracking problem of WMRs which are actuated by two independent electrical motors is deliberated. To this end, and ...

Nonholonomic wheeled mobile robots are often required to implement algorithms designed for holonomic kinematic systems. This creates a velocity tracking problem for the actual wheeled mobile robot. In this paper, we investigate the issue of tracking the desired velocity in the least amount of time, for a differential drive nonholonomic wheeled mobile robot. If the desired velocity is a constant...

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...

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...