Autonomous Navigation of 3 Wheel Robots Using Rotary Encoders and Gyroscope

Holonomic Robots are advantageous over non holonomic robots as they provide control to all of its degrees of freedom. Autonomous navigation of holonomic robots is expensive as it requires many costly odometry sensors. In this paper, a novel approach is proposed for the application of PID algorithm for autonomous navigation by reducing the complexity of 3 wheel drive to 2 wheel drive. A comparison with algorithms involving three encoders is discussed. Our system employs two rotary encoders instead of three and a yaw-rate gyroscope. Equations for generation of coordinates in free space are derived and trajectory following is performed. The algorithm has been successfully tested using various paths and speeds and the implementation results are described here.