Dribbling Control of Omnidirectional Soccer Robots

This paper focuses on the dribbling control problem of an omnidirectional mobile robot. Because the movement of the dribbled object must be considered, dribbling control is more challenging than normal mobile robot motion control. A new feedback control algorithm, which steers a reference point to follow the desired movement and keeps the ball near to this point simultaneously, is proposed. To dribble a rolling ball along a given path, the robot should provide the ball with appropriate force by consecutive pushing operations when they travel in an environment with obstacles. Based on the analysis of the forces acting on the ball with respect to the mobile robot coordinate system, a constraint for robot movement in the dribbling process is also introduced. The simulation and real-world experiments address the performance of this control algorithm.