Mobile Robotics 2023-2024

Please visit this link to access to some general purpose books and notes.

Let me highlight the invaluable booklet written by Luca Baglivo and other colleagues from Mechatronics Department at UNITN that is a real compendium of 2/3 of the course. Here almost the same book up to dated with notes made during the years.

Hereafter teaching and technical material mainly produced during the present 2023-2024 academic year:

PART I – WHEELED MOBILE ROBOTS

  • [Wed, 13 September 2023] Slides of Lecture 1 “Kinematics – Part 1” (video):
    • Autonomous and Wheeled Mobile Robots (WMRs) introduction.
    • Mechanical and theoretical aspects of wheel modeling.
    • Geometric and analytic introduction to unicycle, bicycle/car-like (FD and RD) mathematical constraints and other kinematic models.
    • Mechanics constraints imposed by wheel configuration, WMR mobility, steerability and DOFs.
      • Kinematics/mechanical classifications and some other tips, one might refer to this document.
    • Moreover I would like to mention some slides about kinematics also in ppt format of colleagues which clarify some peculiar aspects of omnidirectional (3,0) WMR kinematics.
    • Moreover, here there are some notes about Swedish wheels dynamics and application on mobile robots.
  • [Thu, 14 September 2023] Slides of Lecture 2 “Kinematics – Part 2” (video):
    • An introduction to Unicycle, Bicycle, Car-like and other kinematic models.
    • About mechanics constraints of wheels, WMR mobility and steerability,
    • Kinematics/mechanical classifications and some other tips, one might refer to this document.

PART II – PATH-PLANNING

  • [Wed, 18 October 2023] Slides of Lecture 6 “Path planning (Part 1) and a MatLab tutorial”  (video):
    • Starting to link with the path/traj planning issues; a few controller structures are presented.
    • Path and Trajectory “extension” is discussed and the approach correctly addressed with the introduction of the time scaling for kinematic models and the differential flatness for nonlinear dynamic systems.
    • Point-to-point path planning in C-space and W-space.
    • Polynomial interpolation in both C-and W-space.
    • Cubic polynomial interpolation in time, quintic polynomial interpolation ti fix initial and final positions, velocities and accelerations at once.
    • Higher-order polynomial fitting to take advantage from specific WMR performance.
  • [Fri, 20 October 2023] Slides of Lecture 8 “Chained-form and MATLAB tutorial” (video):
    • Introduction to system flatness vs. controllability vs. accessibility.
    • Considerations about driftless systems.
    • Nonlinear coordinate change, inputs re-redefinition and eigenvector “self-containing” span (meaning involutivity even without mentioning it!)
    • Chained-form with polynomial inputs.
    • Chained-form application to improve robustness (link).
    • MATLAB tutorial.
    • Further material about unicycle Point-to-point path planning (Minotto – De Cecco) in chained-form and and notes on its use with piecewise constant inputs.

PART III – PATH AND MOTION CONTROL

  • done !

In order to aim your efforts, I provide here a sample list of typical questions.

WHAT ABOUT A STUDENT INTERACTIVE LESSON?

2022-2023 Interactive Lesson in Mobile Robotics: path planning