A differential drive wheeled robot is a kind of mobile robot suitable for indoor navigation. Model predictive control is an optimal control technique with various advantages and can achieve excellent performance. One of the main advantages of model predictive control is that it can easily handle constraints. Therefore, it deals with realistic constraints of the mobile robot and achieves admirable performance for trajectory tracking. In addition, the intention of the robot can be properly realized by adjusting the weight of the cost function component. This control technique is applied to the local planner of the navigation component so that the mobile robot can operate in real environment. Using the Robot Operating System (ROS), which has transcendent advantages in robot development, we have ensured that the algorithm works in the simulation and real experiment.

In a four-wheel independent drive platform, four wheels and motors are connected directly, and the rotation of the motors generates the power of the platform. It uses a skid steering system that steers based on the difference in rotational power between wheel motors. The platform can control the speed of each wheel individually and has excellent mobility on dirt roads. However, the difficulty of the straight-running is caused due to torque distribution variation in each wheel’s motor, and the direction of rotation of the wheel, and moving direction of the platform, and the difference of the platform’s target direction. This paper describes an algorithm to detect the slip generated on each wheel when a four-wheel independent drive platform is traveling in a harsh environment. When the slip is detected, a compensation control algorithm is activated to compensate the torque of the motor mounted on the platform to improve the trajectory tracking performance of the platform. The four-wheel independent drive platform developed for this study verified the algorithm. The wheel slip detection and the compensation control algorithm of the platform are expected to improve the stability of trajectory tracking.

Conventional path tracking methods designed for two-wheeled differential drive robots are not suitable for omni-directional robots. In this study, we present a controller which can accomplish more accurate path tracking and orientation correction by exploiting the unconstrained movement capability of omni-directional robots. The proposed controller is proven to be stable using a Lyapunov stability criterion. Various experiments in real environments show that performance of path tracking and orientation correction has improved in the proposed controller.