Simulating Simple Tasks for a Kinematic Model of Differential-drive Mobile Robots

Controller design and verification by simulation is explored in this paper, for simple mobile robot tasks such as moving to a point, aligning with a line defined on the motion plane or driving to a predefined pose on the plane. The paper is set in the context of a study on vision-based control and is concerned with the step of using software to simulate the behaviour of a differential-drive mobile robot. Kinematic models are reviewed and presented, along with controller formulae for the enumerated tasks. Model implementations using Simulink are described and ran with predefined parameters, while the last part of the paper illustrates simulation results.