Trajectory entrainment with human assistance of wheeled mobile system

Abstract

Cart control requires propulsion and steering simultaneously. It will impose the user a hard workload in crowded environment. To overcome this problem, we design a safe auto-steering wheeled mobile system. In this paper, the steering is controlled by an attractor controller that entrains the cart to the reference trajectory based on vector field. The trajectory and vector field are designed under non-holonomic constraints, and the controller is designed by functional approximation with an averaging method of the vector field. A cart system is designed and prototyped. The experimental results show that the propulsion force obtained from the user confirms the safety against collision with pedestrian.

Keywords

• semi-autonomous transportation cart
• attractor design
• human-assistive robot
• wheeled mobile system
• auto-steering
• non-holonomic constraints