Motion Control of a Wheeled Millirobot

This paper presents a new closed-loop control system for a novel wheeled millirobot, mROBerTO, developed at the University of Toronto. The proposed system was verified via vision-based robot-pose tracking, a centralized computer for directing movement, and a firmware PID controller. Further modification to the original robot structure, via the addition of stabilizing arms, was made to improve tracking performance. Numerous motion-control experiments were performed to evaluate the performance and robustness of the controller on the millirobot. The system presented is simple, requires little knowledge of robot’s motion characteristics, and consumes limited processing capabilities. Furthermore, experimental results show that the system can provide accurate motion control for various trajectories despite the limitations that result from the small footprint of mROBerTO, 16×16×32 mm.

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