Stable Switching Control of Wheeled Mobile Robots

Abstract

In this Chapter it has been presented a switched countour-following controller, which allows a wheeled mobile robot to follow discontinuous walls` contours. This controller has been developed by considering a standard (stable) wall-following controller and aggregating two complementary (also stable) controllers. One risponsible for avoid collisions between the robot and the object which is being followed, and the other responsible for find a lost contour of this same object. This new swiching controller proved to be stable with respect to its swiching signal, guaranteing that the robot will be able to stay at a desired robot-to-object distance, and with the same object orientation. Next, this controllers was included into a SLAM algorithm, in order to deal with the exploration and map construction of unknown environments, exposing the modularity capability of this kind of control architecture.