Design and implementation of a 4WS4WD mobile robot and its control applications

This paper mainly develops of a four-wheel steering and four-wheel drive (4WS4WD) mobile robot and examines its control applications. The 4WS4WD possesses the benefits of the 4WD structure and the advantages of a 4WS system, and has the better performance of lateral dynamics in comparison with traditional mobile robots. By handling the 4WS4WD mobile robot, the motion control, obstacle avoidance and control strategy are addressed in this paper. The robotic maneuver control for 4WS4WD mobile robot is firstly investigated. For obstacle avoidance, the dynamic window approach (DWA) is used to safely control the mobile robot. The A* algorithm is adopted to implement the path planning and mobile robot navigation system. The experimental results demonstrate that the realized mobile robot can successfully conquer many kinds of terrains and carry out all the tasks in the SKS Intelligent Security Robot Competition held in Taipei International Robot Show (TIROS).