FIRST RESULTS USING ROBUST CONTROLLER SYNTHESIS IN AUTOMATIC GUIDED VEHICLES APPLICATIONS Philippe Martinet, Christian Thibaud, Djamel Khadraoui, Jean Gallice

We have been interested in Automatic Guided Vehicles (AGV) for several years. In this paper, we synthesize controllers for AGV applications. Particularly, we are interested in road following and direction change tasks, and in analyzing the influence of roll and pitch perturbations on vehicle behaviour. We use the bicycle as the kinematic vehicle model, and we choose the white band position of the road as the sensor signal. We define an interaction between the camera, which is mounted inside the vehicle, and the white band detected in the image space. Using this kind of interaction, we present how to use a pole assignment technique to solve the servoing task. We show the simulation and experimental results (1/10 scale demonstrator) with and without perturbations. Then, we investigate in robust controller to slow down the effect of perturbations on the vehicle behaviour. Keywords: Visual servoing, robust control, mobile robot, vehicles, modelling, vision 1.