Control design for an overactuated wheeled mobile robot

In order to simulate road vehicles in a hardware-in-the-loop test setup, TNO has developed a wheeled mobile robot with independently driven and steered wheels. This robot is overactuated, i.e. the number of actuators exceeds the number of spatial degrees of freedom to be controlled. A position controller based on feedback linearization is presented. This controller takes the overactuatedness into account by using the so-called multicycle approach, which essentially regards the robot as a combination of independent unicycles. As a result, the robot is position controlled while the redundant actuators are used to compensate for weight transfer during acceleration and cornering.