In this paper, a detail design procedure of the real-time trajectory tracking for the nonholonomic wheeled mobile robot (NWMR) is proposed. A 9-axis micro electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensor is used to measure the posture of the NWMR, the position information of NWMR and the hand-held device are acquired by global positioning system (GPS) and then transmit via radio frequency (RF) module. In addition, in order to avoid the gimbal lock produced by the posture computation from Euler angles, the quaternion is utilized to compute the posture of the NWMR. Furthermore, the Kalman filter is used to filter out the readout noise of the GPS and calculate the position of NWMR and then track the object. The simulation results show the posture error between the NWMR and the hand-held device can converge to zero after 3.928 seconds for the dynamic tracking. Lastly, the experimental results show the validation and feasibility of the proposed results.
Keywords: Kalman filter; global positioning system (GPS); nonholonomic; quaternion; radio frequency (RF); tracking control; trajectory tracking; wheeled mobile robot (WMR).