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Controlling a Unicycle Mobile Platform Pushing 1 and 2 Passive Trailers

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Abstract

This work deals with a unicycle-like mobile platform pushing one and two trailers connected to it, mimicking an application in precision agriculture. The idea is to have a tractor vehicle pushing or pulling passive trailers with materials to be moved accordingly. The first part corresponds to the development of a suitable model for the whole underactuated system, the articulated chain, considering that a point of interest in the last trailer should follow a specified path. Thus, as the trailers are passive subsystems, the way a trailer is connected to the mobile robot or another trailer allows transferring velocities, even when the two bodies have different heading angles. Therefore, the first contribution of the paper is to model these relations, considering a robot pushing one or two trailers. After getting a suitable model for the whole system, two controllers were developed, one based only on inverse kinematics, and the other adding a compensation of the robot dynamics to the kinematic controller, in this case building a cascade or inner-outer loop control structure. The objective behind the design of these two controllers is to compare their performance when guiding the multi-articulated vehicle to accomplish a path-following task, aiming at selecting the best of these two controllers. Finally, experiments run are discussed, whose results validate the proposed model and control system, besides allowing concluding that the best option is to adopt the kinematic controller plus the dynamic compensation, mainly for higher velocities, which is the main contribution of the paper.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Universdade Federal do Espírito Santo (UFES) and Instituto Federal de Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia do Espírito Santo (IFES), Campus Guarapari, for the support given to the project. Dr. Mario Sarcinelli-Filho also thanks CNPq - Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico, agency of the Brazilian Ministry of Science, Technology, Innovations and Communications, and FAPES - Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa e Inovação do Espírito Santo, agency of the State of Espírito Santo, Brazil, for financing this research.

Funding

CNPq - Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológi-co, agency of the Brazilian Ministry of Science, Technology, Innovations and Communications and FAPES - Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa e Inovação, agency of the State of Espírito Santo, Brazil.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Engenharia Elétrica, Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo, Av. Fernando Ferrari, 514, 29075-910, Vitória, ES, Brazil

    Diego Nunes Bertolani & Vinicius Pacheco Bacheti

  2. Coordenadoria do Curso Técnico em Eletrotécnica, Instituto Federal de Educação Ciência e Tecnologia do Espírito Santo, Alameda Francisco Vieira Simões, 720, 29216-795, Guarapari, ES, Brazil

    Diego Nunes Bertolani

  3. Departamento de Engenharia Elétrica, Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo, Av. Fernando Ferrari, 514, 29075-910, Vitória, ES, Brazil

    Mário Sarcinelli-Filho

Authors
  1. Diego Nunes Bertolani
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  2. Vinicius Pacheco Bacheti
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  3. Mário Sarcinelli-Filho
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Contributions

1. Diego Nunes Bertolani: model development, experiment design and execution, data analysis and manuscript writing;

2. Vinicius Pacheco Bacheti: support in model development, experiment design and execution and manuscript writing;

3. Mário Sarcinelli-Filho: research supervision, experiment supervision, data analysis, manuscript writing supervision and text revision.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Diego Nunes Bertolani.

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Research financed by CNPq - Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico, a granting agency of the Brazilian Ministry of Science, Technology, Innovations and Communications, and FAPES - Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa e Inovação do Espírito Santo, a granting agency of the State of Espírito Santo, Brazil

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Bertolani, D.N., Bacheti, V.P. & Sarcinelli-Filho, M. Controlling a Unicycle Mobile Platform Pushing 1 and 2 Passive Trailers. J Intell Robot Syst 103, 43 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-021-01478-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-021-01478-z

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