Hybrid navigation of a four-wheeled tour-guide robot

This paper develops methodologies and techniques for motion control and autonomous navigation of a tour-guide robot with a four-wheeled omni-directional mobile platform. A nonlinear unified kinematical control method is presented for point stabilization and trajectory tracking of a mobile robot which equipped with four independent driving omni-directional wheels equally spaced at 90 degrees between adjacent wheels. A hybrid navigation method is proposed to achieve safely autonomous navigation of the tour-guide robot; this approach includes two behaviors: one is the point-to-point trajectory tracking, and the other is the obstacle avoidance function using the traversability distance histogram (TDH) method to avoid barriers in museums. The effectiveness and merit of the proposed techniques are exemplified by conducting several experiments on an experimental four-wheeled omni-directional tour-guide robot.