A higher level path tracking controller for a four-wheel differentially steered mobile robot

A variety of approaches for path tracking control of wheeled mobile robots have been implemented. While most of these are based on controlling the robot dynamics, they are not applicable if the robot dynamics are inaccessible. In this paper, a fuzzy logic controller (FLC) for the path tracking of a wheeled mobile robot based on controlling the robot at a higher level is presented. The controller is highly robust and flexible and automatically follows a sequence of discrete waypoints, and no interpolation of the waypoints is needed to generate a continuous reference trajectory. The speeds are varied depending on the variations in the path and on the posture of the robot. The heuristic rules of the FLC are based on an analogy with a human driving a car and the optimization of the controller is based on experimentation. The implementation on a P3-AT mobile robot shows the effectiveness of the proposed approach.