Gazebo Simulation of Autonomous Delivery Robot using Model Predictive Control for High-speed Mobility

Since the advent of the fourth industrial revolution, the autonomous delivery robot industry has been growing explosively. Existing autonomous delivery robots exhibit limited high-speed mobility performance owing to inertial and centrifugal forces caused by the high center of mass. Therefore, this study proposed an autonomous delivery robot control method based on model predictive control (MPC) to facilitate the high-speed mobility of these robots via Gazebo simulations. In this study, a simulation was conducted based on HuboQ, which was manufactured as part of the research on developing basic technology for robots that can move at high speed. Regarding the HuboQ motion plan, discrete MPC was applied to the cart inverted pendulum model. To verify the stability of the target robot and a delivery item, a 1 kg cylindrical delivery item was placed on the robot in the simulation. Subsequently, the robot moved according to a rounded square trajectory and an 8-shape trajectory. The simulation results indicated that the delivery item moved by 9 mm in the x-axis direction and by 10 mm in the y-axis direction at maximum. Based on the simulation results, it was verified that the delivery item was stably controlled even when the robot moved at a high speed of 11km/h or higher. A demonstration of our method can be seen in the video: https://youtu.be/_E_AzuI2_pE.