Trajectory Planning and Tracking Control of a Differential-Drive Mobile Robot in a Picture Drawing Application

Abstract

This paper proposes a method for trajectory planning and control of a mobile robot for application in picture drawing from images. The robot is an accurate differential drive mobile robot platform controlled by a field-programmable-gate-array (FPGA) controller. By not locating the tip of the pen at the middle between two wheels, we are able to construct an omnidirectional mobile platform, thus implementing a simple and effective trajectory control method. The reference trajectories are generated based on line simplification and B-spline approximation of digitized input curves obtained from Canny’s edge-detection algorithm on a gray image. Experimental results for image picture drawing show the advantage of this proposed method.

Keywords

• differential drive mobile robot
• trajectory control
• edge-detection
• line simplification
• B-spline approximation