Nonlinear predictive control of an omnidirectional robot dribbling a rolling ball

This paper focuses on the dribbling control problem of an omnidirectional mobile robot and a rolling ball in the RoboCup middle size domain. Because the ball easily slides away from the robot when the ball moves along a curve, dribbling control is more challenging than the normal mobile robot motion control problem. Based on an introduced reference point with respect to the robot body and a sophisticated planning method of robot pose, the nonlinear predictive control is used to steer the robot to follow the planned poses so as to prevent the ball from leaving the robot. Real-world experiments showed that nonlinear predictive control is capable of solving the pose following problem in a real-time application.