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, 25 September 2024] and
- [Thu, 26 September 2024] Slides of “Lecture 1 “Introduction to Wheeled Mobile Robots (WMRs) and Mechanical Degrees of Freedom (DOFs)” (video) + “Lecture 2 – Introduction to dynamic systems with MATLAB – 20240926b” + (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 anPART I – WHEELED MOBILE ROBOTSd DOFs.
- Kinematics and mechanic classifications (and other tips) might be further investigated by having a look at the following document. which is part of the Springer Handbook of Robotics (Siciliano&Khatib).
- Moreover, I would like to mention some material produced by eminent colleagues about kinematics also in ppt format of colleagues which provide further details about some peculiar aspects of omnidirectional (3,0) WMRs.
- Here there are some notes about Swedish wheels dynamics and application.
- [Fri, 27 September 2024] and
- [Wed, 16 October 2024] and
- [Wed, 23 October 2024] Slides Lecture 3 “WMR kinematic models – Part 1” (video) + Lecture 4 “WMR kinematic models – Part 2 – MATLAB tutorial” (video) + Lecture 5 “WMR kinematic models – Part 3” (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.
- First Matlab tutorial about Unicycle kinematics, math models and dynamical system evolution.
- Another Matlab tutorial about non-trivial unicycle kinematics, Front- and Rear-Driven Car-like kinematics, etc.
- The slides will be delivered after the tutorial, in order to carry out the exercises.
- [Wed, 23 October 2024] Slides of Lecture 6 “Odometry and numerical integration with MATLAB” (video):
- Odometry localization with proprio-ceptive sensors.
- Numerical integration applied to WMRs.
- The original work of Ziegler-Nichols 1942.
PART II – PATH-PLANNING
- [Thu, 24 October 2024] Slides of Lecture 7 “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 vs W-space.
- Polynomial interpolation in both C-space vs W-space.
- Cubic polynomial interpolation in time, quintic polynomial interpolation to impose initial and final positions, velocities and accelerations at once.
- Higher-order polynomial fitting to take advantage from specific WMR performance.
- [Fri, 25 October 2024] COMPLEMENTARY: Slides of Lecture 8 “PID tuning with the original Ziegler-Nichols approaches with MATLAB” (video):
- Dynamic Systems and PID controllers, system stability, transient and permanent regimes and other basic considerations.
- Introduction to the Ziegler-Nichols self-oscillation and step-response methods, calculations, results and system simulation.
- MATLAB code.
- Original publication from Ziegler-Nichols (1942).
- [Wed, 6 November 2024] Slides of Lezione 9 – “Path-planning (Part 2) and the Chained-form transformation with MATLAB” (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.
- [Thu, 14 November 2024] Slides of Lecture 10 – Path-planning (Part 3) and the Clothoid approach with MATLAB (video):
- Clothoid’s approach.
- Roadmap building online-offline strategies (diagrams, graphs, potential fields.
- MATLAB tutorial with clothoid implementation.
- Continuous curvature slides in Italian (Baglivo – De Cecco).
- [Fri, 15 November 2024] Slides of Lecture 11 – “Path-planning (Part 4) and Global Roadmapping with MATLAB” (video):
- Canonical problem and C-Space
- Global planning via optimal searching algorithms
- A short note about “Voronoi Diagram Based Roadmap Motion Planning“.
- A few further notes about “Cell decomposition” (exact and approximated).
- Matlab code.
PART III – PATH AND MOTION CONTROL
- [Fri, 22 November 2024] Slides of Lecture 12 – “Path-planning (Part 5) and APF and motion control with MATLAB” (video):
- Another short note of “Robot motion planning using exact cell decomposition and potential field methods” coding.
- Planning via artificial potentials + others.
- [Wed, 27 November 2024] Slides of Lecture 13 – Path and motion control with MATLAB (and more) (video).
In order to aim your efforts, I provide here a sample list of typical questions (UP TO DATED AT 2024-2025).
HERE WE ARE FINALLY !