Kinematic control of wheeled mobile robots

A generic kinematic control, which is directly applicable to any type of wheeled mobile robot, is proposed in this work. Firstly, it is presented the kinematic models of the four common types of wheels (fixed, centered orientable, castor and Swedish) a classification of wheeled mobile robots. Afterwards, it is proposed a kinematic control scheme with three nested loops: dynamic, kinematic and planning. In particular, it is studied in depth the kinematic loop through the position control and the inverse kinematics of wheels. It is also studied indirectly the planning loop through the characterization of the references that each type of mobile robot can track with no error. Finally, the kinematic control proposed is applied to an industrial forklift in simulation and in a real situation.