Mobile robot control architecture via control output fusion: stability issues

EDUARDO FREIRE; TEODIANO FREIRE BASTOS; MARIO SARCINELLIL; RICARDO CARELLI

Lisboa, Portugal

Conferencia; Mediterranean Control Conference, MED2002; 2002

A new architecture proposed by the authors in previous papers for controlling the navigation of a mobile robot, called fusion of the output of different controllers, is considered again. The novelty here included is the analysis of the stability of such control architecture. Both a formal Lyapunov-type analysis and a conjecture based on energy considerations are presented. In  addition, a supervisor is included in the original control architecture in order to allow detecting changes in the robot navigation phases and ensuring the accomplishment of the stability conjecture. The control system thus modified is implemented in a commercial robot and practical experiments are run. Their results are presented in order to illustrate the system performance.