Identification and control of a Unmanned Ground Vehicle by using Arduino

In this paper, an identification activity and a control application conducted on a Unmanned Ground Vehicle by using low cost components and open source software are presented. The chassis of the vehicle is made of methyl methacrylate on which are mounted the wheel-motors group, the drives, and the ArduinoMega 2560 microcontroller. Furthermore, ultrasonic sensors and accelerometers are used for achieving the obstacle detection and for obtaining control signal feedback. The N4SID (Numerical algorithms for Subspace State Space System Identification) method was used to obtain a dynamical model of the unmanned vehicle, while open-loop and closed-loop control algorithms were implemented on the ArduinoMega controller. The results obtained in this investigation show the effectiveness of the proposed method for achieving the identification and control of mechanical systems.