Ease of dynamic modelling of Wheeled Mobile Robots (WMRs) using Kane's approach

This article illustrates the ease of modelling the dynamics of Wheeled Mobile Robots (WMRs) using the Kane's approach for non-holonomic systems. For a control engineer, the Kane's method offers several unique advantages over Newton-Euler and Lagrangian approaches used in available literature. The Kane's method provides a physical Insight into the nature of non-holonomic systems by incorporating the motion constraints as part of the derivation. The presented approach focusses on the degress of freedom and not on the configuration, and this eliminates redundancy. Explicit expressions to compute the dynamic wheel loads needed by tyre friction models are derived. This paper describes a procedure developed to deduce the dynamics of a differentially driven WMR with suspended loads and operating an various terrains. Since the Kane's approach provides a systematic modelling scheme, the method proposed in this paper can be easily generalized to model WMRs with various wheel types and configurations and for various loading conditions. The dynamic model is mathematically simple and is suited for real time control applications.