Articulated mobile robots consisting of a tractor and passively off-hooked trailers belong to a class of highly nonlinear, nonholonomic, structurally unstable, differentially nonflat, and underactuated dynamic systems. Due to the mentioned properties of their kinematics, motion control problems related to N-trailer robots (N-trailers) are non-trivial and challenging. Cascaded control strategy presented in this paper provides unified solution to the set-point and trajectory tracking control tasks for articulated robots equipped with arbitrary number of passively off-axle hitched trailers. Practically useful features of the proposed controller come from its high scalability and from application of the VectorField-Orientation (VFO) controller in the outer loop, which ensures fast errors convergence and simplicity of control implementation and tuning. Control input limitations of the robot are directly taken into account by utilization of a simple velocity scaling procedure which preserves an instantaneous motion curvature of a tractor. Description

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Specificity of a software package composed of two parts which control an optoelectronic sensor of the computer-aided system made to realize the nonoinvasive measurements of the arterial blood oxygen saturation as well as some parameters of the peripheral pulse waveform, has been described. Principles of the transmission variant of the one and only noninvasive measurement method, so-called pulse oximetry, has been utilized. The software co-ordinates the suitable cooperation of an IBM PC compatible microcomputer with the sensor and one specialized card. This novel card is a key part of the whole measuring system which some application fields are extended in comparison to pulse oximeters commonly attainbie. The user-friendly MS Windows graphical environment which creates the system to be multitask and nonpreemptive, has been used to design the specific part of the programming presented here. With this environment, sophisticated tasks ofthe software package can be performed without excessive complication.