A fast path planning-and-tracking control for wheeled mobile robots

This paper presents a fast method to plan the path, and control the position of wheeled mobile robots (WMR) in a robot soccer game. In a WMR system with position control, when the target position is given, the controller will generate the reference path and then the WMR will move to the target position following the reference path. To tackle the difficulties of the nonlinear control problem, the motion of the WMR is realized via changing the linear displacement and angular displacement in a separate manner such that the WMR is either rotating or moving in a straight line at any one time. This method takes advantage of a proposed fast path-planning algorithm. The complexity of design is thus significantly reduced.