Wall-following control of an infrared sensors guided wheeled mobile robot

Abstract

Wall-following is an effective and economical approach for a robot to navigate in an environment where physical features like walls exist as natural references for its movements. During the robot's wall-following process where the working space is limited and unstructured, cost effective proximity sensors (sonar or infrared) are more suitable than other expensive sensors (like visions) to feedback the states of the robot and its surroundings to the controller. In this article, a wall-following control approach is proposed for a wheeled mobile robot equipped with group of infrared sensors. The linear and angular positions of the robot with respect to the wall are derived by processing the readings of the sensors. A method to detect the discontinuity of the wall is also presented. The controller is designed with Lyapunov method whose asymptotical stability is guaranteed. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is proved and verified by an initial experimental study.