Design and Control of Educational Mobile Robot for Material Transport in Intelligent Manufacturing System

Abstract

This paper presents an approach to design and control an intelligent mobile robot for material transport in manufacturing system. Two DC motors are used in order to configure differential drive mobile robot. Furthermore, mobile robot is designed using Arduino microcontrollers, which are compatible with MATLAB and Simulink. Steering controls for translation and rotation of mobile robot are obtained using artificial neural networks (ANNs), which are trained in MATLAB neural network toolbox and implemented in Simulink model. Simulink model is also used for modeling of the transportation route which mobile robot follows as well as acquiring data from sensors. Experimental results show that mobile robot, using the described methodology, is able to complete the transportation task with satisfactory accuracy.