Design, control, and performance of the ‘weed’ 6 wheel robot in the UK MOD grand challenge

Abstract

A new locomotion method for unmanned (autonomous) ground vehicles (UGV) is proposed based around six independently driven wheels mounted on three separate modules. Each module is attached to the overall robot via a pivot point and capable of independently controlling its orientation and velocity. This configuration allows the UGV to perform maneuvers conventional vehicles cannot perform, and in particular to control the body orientation separately from the movement direction. The locomotion method is mathematically analyzed to develop appropriate control algorithms and to demonstrate the vehicle performance criteria. A vehicle was constructed according to the proposed configuration and experimentally tested in the UK MOD grand challenge. The performance of the developed locomotion schemes helped the robot make it to the finale of the competition.

Distributed Adaptive Time-Varying Group Formation Tracking for Multiagent Systems With Multiple Leaders on Directed Graphs

“…Now, applying feedback linearization, we obtain the linearized state-space model for each mobile robot (including the followers and leaders) which conforms to (2) with…”