Integrated Estimation for Wheeled Mobile Robot posture, velocities, and wheel skidding perturbations

This paper presents a scheme for high-update rate wheel mobile robot (WMR) posture, velocities, and perturbation estimation using real-time kinematic global positioning system (RTK-GPS) and inertial sensors for WMR control in the presence of wheel skidding and slipping. An outdoor estimation system based on Kalman filtering combines the inertial measurements with centimeter accuracy RTK-GPS measurements to provide essential posture, velocities, and perturbation information. The particular contribution of this paper is in designing an estimation system to be able to deal with WMR control problems in the presence of wheel skidding and slipping. The experimental results suggest that with careful modelling of WMR, the estimation scheme is able to provide reliable and high update rate information for WMR control applications in the presence of wheel skidding and slipping.