Stable AGV corridor navigation based on data and control signal fusion

RICARDO CARELLI; CARLOS SORIA; EDUARDO FREIRE

Río Cuarto, Argentina

Simposio; XI Reunión de Trabajo en Procesamiento de la Información y Control, RPIC05; 2005

Universidad Nacional de Río Cuarto

This work presents a control strategy for mobile robots navigating in corridors, using the fusion of the control signals from two redundant or homogeneous controllers: one is based on the optical flow calculation and the other is based on the position of the robot with respect to the centerline of the corridor, which is estimated using the data fusion from ultrasonic and vision sensors.  Both controllers generate angular velocity commands to keep the robot navigating along the corridor, and compensate for the dynamics of the robot. The fusion of both control signals is done through a Decentralized Information Filter. The stability of the resulting control system is analyzed. Experiments on a laboratory robot are presented to show the feasibility and performance of the proposed control system.