Control of a mobile robot with passive multiple trailers

A mobile service robot can achieve reconfigurability by exploiting passive trailer systems. Reconfigurability provides significant practical advantages in order to deal with various service tasks. However, a motion control problem of a passive multiple trailer system is difficult, mainly because a kinematic model is highly nonlinear. It is shown how a robot with n passive trailers can be controlled in backward direction. Once a desired trajectory of a last trailer is computed, then the control input of a pushing robot is obtained by the proposed control scheme. A kinematic design of a trailer system is proposed in our prior work. It is shown that the high performance of trajectory tracking is also valid for the backward motion control problem. Experimental verifications were carried out with the PSR-2 (public service robot) with three passive trailers. Experimental result showed that the backward motion control could be successfully carried out using the proposed control scheme.