Studies of a Two-Wheeled Self-Balancing Mobile Robot Based on a Simulation Viewpoint

A two-wheeled mobile robot is not able to keep itself upright without the aid of an active controller, because its structure works in much the same way as an inverted pendulum mounted on a wheel base. This paper presents the design of a Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controller for a two-wheeled self-balancing mobile robot, which was designed and tested through co-simulation instead of deriving a full mathematical dynamic model. A three-dimensional model of the robot, made up of a chassis, coaxial wheels and drive motors, and an elevated battery load that produces the moving centroid needed for the robot to behave like an inverted pendulum, was built in Solid Works and imported into MSC Adams as a virtual prototype. The Adams model was then exported as an adams_sub block into Matlab/Simulink, where a discrete PID controller was designed and manually tuned to control the tilt angle of the robot by adjusting the speed of both wheels. Co-simulation was carried out for three cases: self-balancing while at rest, moving forward at a 1-degree tilt angle on a flat platform, and moving across a 10-degree bump. The results show that a proportional-only controller was already enough to balance the robot at rest, while adding the integral and derivative terms during forward motion reduced the steady-state error to a negligible value and kept the overshoot to about 10.8%. The tuned controller (Kp = 40, Ki = 450, Kd = 0.11) also managed to keep the robot from falling while crossing the bump, although the disturbance caused by the bump was not fully rejected. A weakness noticed during forward motion, where the robot drifted sideways because of an uncontrolled yaw angle, was fixed by adding a second PID loop that drives the two wheels at different speeds, although this introduced some cross-coupled noise between the tilt and yaw loops. These results show that co-simulation between Adams and Matlab is an effective alternative to deriving a full mathematical model, reducing the need for a physical prototype and supporting efficient preliminary validation of controllers for two-wheeled self-balancing robots.

two-wheeled self-balancing robot, PID controller, co-simulation, Adams-Matlab, inverted pendulum, mobile robot

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