Control of a wheeled stair-climbing robot using linear programming

This paper introduces a new formalism to deal with constrained dynamic systems. It shows that, when the constraints are linear, the controller can take advantage of linear programming algorithms (such as the simplex) to guarantee that the constraints will be satisfied. To illustrate the contribution of the approach, the control problem of a wheeled stair-climbing robot is considered. Masses supported by the robot have to be moved in order to avoid any sliding of the wheels. For such control problems where strong nonlinearities occur, conventional control methods fail to provide any reliable controller.