Egerstedt Magnus. Control of Autonomous Mobile Robots

Control of Autonomous Mobile Robots [thesis]
Magnus Egerstedt
School of Electrical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332, U.S.A., magnus@ece.gatech.edu12 pagesAn example of a reactive, mobile, embedded control system that has re- ceived considerable attention during the last decade is the autonomous mobile robot. The flurry of research activities in this area can be directly traced to the many exciting current and future applications where robotic systems are safer/cheaper/more effective than their human counterparts. Examples of cur- rent applications include
Domestic service robots, such as autonomous vacuum cleaners, lawn mow- ers, and pool cleaners;
Planetary exploration robots, such as the NASA Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity;
Autonomous robots for military applications, including surveillance and search-and-destroy robots; and
Robots for monitoring, exploring, and securing unsafe environments, such as bomb sniffers, disaster site robots, and mine sweepers.
Notably absent from this list are the many robots employed in industrial settings. Such industrial robots are not considered here since they typically op- erate in highly structured environments, where the maneuvers can be planned in advance, resulting in challenging, yet standard, tracking problems. In con- trast to this, autonomous mobile robots operate in partially or completely unknown environments, where the occurrences of unmodeled obstacles are commonplace. What this means is that the complexity of the control task is increased due to the complexity of the environment in which the system operates, which imposes a number of challenges on the control design. In this chapter we will cover modeling and architectural design issues for such sys- tems. We will moreover discuss some implementation aspects as well as outline a collection of major challenges that still remain to be solved.