Virtual Simulator for Design of Mobile Robot Control and Navigation Systems

Abstract

The development of control systems for independent mobile robots has appear as a great challenge for the researchers until the current days. Different platform for the project of control system for independent mobile robots come being used in diverse research areas. Per many years the researchers have constructed control systems that present an intelligent behavior in controlled environments, with ideal situations, but that normally does not keep the same performance in the real world. Innumerable systems of control exist to be used in the real world, but generally these systems are limited and they do not present an independent or intelligent behavior. Diverse possible applications for the mobile robots already exist. In the transport, monitoring, inspection, cleanness of houses, space exploration, aid the physical deficient, among others. However, the independent mobile robots had not yet caused much impact in domestic or industrial applications, mainly had the lack of a system with robust, trustworthy and flexible control that it would allow these robots operated in dynamic environments, less structuralized, and inhabited by human beings. The development of a mobile robotic model system with open architecture and flexible control, with robust control system, that incorporates what exists of modern in terms of embedded hardware technology and that makes possible the operation of a mobile robotic systems in a real world environment is one of the motivations of this work. The locomotion planning, under some types of restrictions, is a very vast field of research in the area of the mobile robotics (Graf, 2001). The basic planning of trajectory for the mobile robots imply the determination of a way in the space-C (configuration space) between an initial configuration of the robot and a final configuration, in such a way that the robot does not collide with no obstacle in the environment, and that the planned movement is consistent with the kinematic restrictions of the vehicle. In this context, one of the boarded points in this work was development of a trajectory calculator for mobile robots. One of the main motivations of this work is to propitiate a virtual environment that facilitates the development of archetypes of embedded systems, emphasizing the implementation 26