Working Progress Towards Lawn Mower Automation

Mobile Robot, Nonlinear Control, Path Planning

This paper is a working progress towards an automation of the Spider lawn mower (SLM) which is a four synchronized steering wheel mobile robot. During the functioning, the SML must follow cutting grass edge with no overlapping of a strip of cut grass and also satisfy slippage constrains. To this end, a small prototype called Andromina which is a four-independent steering wheel mobile robot has been chosen to verify the control approach. This paper proposes to implement a mathematical model that takes into account the kinematics and dynamics of the mobile robot and also a nonlinear control strategy like the state feedback linearization. The most important advantage of the proposed model-control strategy is that it takes into account the nonlinearities of the system and a control law becomes a linear one. The path following tracking error has been verified by the statistical approach called analysis t-test and also results of real data simulations have shown the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy applied to a four-independent steering nonholonomic wheeled mobile robot.