Abstract
Steerable wheeled mobile robots gain mobility by employing fully steerable conventional wheels, having two active joints, one for steering, and another for driving. Despite having only one degree of mobility (DOM) (defined here as the instantaneously accessible degrees of freedom DOF), corresponding to the rotation about the instantaneous center of rotation (ICR), such robots can perform complex 2D planar trajectories. They are cheaper and have higher load carrying capacity than non-conventional wheels (e.g., Sweedish or Omni-directional), and as such preferred for industrial applications. However, this type of mobile robot structure presents challenging textit{basic} control issues of steering coordination to avoid actuator fighting, avoiding kinematic (ICR at the steering joint axis) and representation (from the mathematical model) singularities. In addition to solving the textit{basic} control problems, this thesis also focuses attention and presents solutions to textit{application level} problems. Specifically we deal with two problems: the first is the necessity to "discontinuously" reconfigure the steer joints, once discontinuity in the robot trajectory occurs. Such situation - discontinuity in robot motion - is more likely to happen nowadays, in the emerging field of human-robot collaboration. Mobile robots working in the vicinity of fast moving human workers, will usually encounter discontinuity in the online computed trajectory. The second appears in applications requiring that some heading angle is to be maintained, some object or feature stays in the field of view (e.g., for vision-based tasks), or the translation verse changes. Then, the ICR point is required to move long distances from one extreme of the workspace to the other, usually passing by the robot geometric center, where the feasible robot velocity is limited. In these application scenarios, the state-of-art ICR based controllers will lead to unsatisfactory behavior/results. In this thesis, we solve the aforementioned application level problems; namely discontinuity in robot velocity commands, and better/efficient planning for ICR point motion control while respecting the maximum steer joint performance limits, and avoiding kinematic and representational singularities. Our findings has been validated experimentally on an industrial mobile base.