Design and path planning of a free-ranging mobile robot with laser range finder

Abstract

The mobile robot can be phenomenologically categorized as the wheeled type, legged type, and the crawl type. Among the these robots of various mobile types, this study covers the wheeled type mobile robot``s design, control and free ranging issues. The wheeled type mobile robot is used not only for the automated guided vehicle (AGV), but also for the domestic cleaning, nursing to serve the patient food in the hospital, delivering the documents in the office building, guiding for the blind or the company visitors, and the ultrafine maintenance robot inside the nuclear power plant. In this study the two mobile type for the developed robot, AGV movement and the translation movement, are explicitly resolved to get the forward/ inverse kinematic and dynamic solutions, which provides capability for the real time calculation as well as the real time dynamics counted control can be possible using the resolved acceleration control method. Simulation results show that the dynamics counted control method is superior to the path tracking method counting the existing kinematic analysis results. Also, we treat the structure and the principle of the developed omnidirectional laser range finder, induces the simple mapping equations for the range data calculation and the identification of the 3D object``s image, image processing algorithm, and the data reduction algorithm for the real time range data processing. Through the experiments, we show that the proposed omnidirectional laser range finder has the high measurement accuracy and the real time identification ability of the environments. The calibration of these laser range finders follows much more complicated process than the usual camera calibration cases, because laser slit emitter must be calibrated as well as the camera itself. CCD camera intrinsic parameters are obtained from the pin-hole camera model. Using these parameters the exact design constants for the laser slit emitter is calculated. The camera location and i...