Control of Spherical Mobile Robots under Environmental Disturbances

Conference: AALE 2019 - 16. Fachkonferenz "Autonome und intelligente Systeme in der Automatisierungstechnik"
02/28/2019 - 03/01/2019 at Heilbronn, Deutschland

Proceedings: AALE 2019

Pages: 8Language: englishTyp: PDF

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Authors:
Weber, Jan; Kaufmann, Christof; Schmidt, Marco (Hochschule Bochum, Campus Velbert Heiligenhaus, Germany)

Abstract:
Many control algorithms discussed in the scientific community are developed in simulated environments. They are often not tested in practice. In an educational project different control algorithms have been designed for spherical robots in a real world environment. This paper discusses these algorithms and assesses their performance under disturbances like external forces. Our system consists of a spherical robot, which is tracked by a camera and controlled by a computer via Bluetooth communication. Due to the complex dynamics of spherical robots, it is not possible to generate a simple robot model, which represents the robot-specific behaviour. Additionally camera hardware and computer vision algorithms cause a huge dead time in the control loop. This is a big challenge for the control algorithm and impacts the dynamics of the controlled system. This work shows two different control algorithms for the robot that track a time-varying position. We demonstrate and compare their performances with experiments under three different disturbances.