This paper presents the development and control of a two wheeled car-like mobile robot using balancing mechanism whose heading control is done by turning the handle. The mobile inverted pendulum is a combined system of a mobile robot and an inverted pendulum system. A sensor fusion technique of low cost sensors such as a gyro sensor and a tilt sensor to measure the balancing angle of the inverted pendulum robot system accurately is implemented. Experimental studies of the trajectory following control task has been conducted by command of steering wheel while balancing.

It is difficult to find a practical solution for the backward-motion control of a car-like mobile robot with n passive trailers. Unlike an omni-directional robot, a car-like mobile robot has nonholonomic constraints and limitations of the steering angle. For these reasons, the backward motion control problem of a car-like mobile robot with n passive trailers is not trivial. In spite of difficulties, backing up a trailer system is useful for parking control. In this study, we proposed a mechanical alteration which is connecting n passive trailers to the front bumper of a car to improve the backward motion control performance. Theoretical verification and simulations show that the backward-motion control of a general car with n passive trailers can be successfully carried out by using the proposed approach.

Recently, automatic parking assist systems are commercially available in some cars. In order to improve the reliability and the accuracy of parking control, pose uncertainty of a vehicle and some experimental issues should be solved. In this paper, following three schemes are proposed. (1) Odometry calibration scheme for the Car-Like Mobile Robot.(CLMR) (2) Accurate localization using Extended Kalman Filter(EKF) based redundant odometry fusion. (3) Trajectory tracking controller to compensate the tracking error of the CLMR. The proposed schemes are experimentally verified using a miniature Car-Like Mobile Robot. This paper shows that odometry accuracy and trajectory tracking performance can be dramatically improved by using the proposed schemes.