General-purpose Autonomous Mobile Robot (AMR) Control Module Development and Implementation

This study proposes an innovative separated Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMR) drive control architecture, including an upper navigation and obstacle avoidance control system and a lower vehicle drive control system. The upper control module is responsible for environment sensing, path planning, and navigation decision-making, which is implemented using the ROS (Robot Operating System) architecture. The lower drive module focuses on motor control and executing basic motion commands. This separated design allows the existing vehicle drive module to be integrated with the AMR control module developed in this study with simple modifications, greatly reducing AMR development’s difficulty. In addition, specific suggestions for system optimization are made, including hardware accuracy improvement and control parameter tuning. Therefore, the experimental results show that the system exhibits stable repeatability in linear motion tests, and the system’s reliability is successfully verified in navigation tests. The results of this research will be helpful for the development of diversified AMRs for different applications, which will not only make mobile robots more widely used but also help AMRs to be introduced into related industries to enhance the degree of intelligence.