PROCEEDINGS

IEEE Asia-Pacific World Congress

on Computer Science and Engineering 2014
(APWC on CSE 2014)

4-5th November 2014, Plantation Island, Fiji

http://i-lab.org.au/conference
 Vision Based Autonomous Path Tracking of a
Mobile Robot using Fuzzy Logic

Edwin Vans Gancho Vachkov Alok Sharma

Dept. of Electrical & Electronic Eng.
Fiji National University
Derrick Campus, Suva
Fiji Islands
Email: vans.edw@gmail.com
School of Engineering & Physics
University of the South Pacific
Laucala Campus, Suva
Fiji Islands
Email: gancho.vachkov@gmail.com
School of Engineering & Physics
University of the South Pacific
Laucala Campus, Suva
Fiji Islands
Email: alok.fj@gmail.com

Abstract—In this paper we present an algorithm for au-
tonomous path tracking of a mobile robot to track straight and
curved paths traced in the environment. The algorithm uses a
fuzzy logic based approach for path tracking so that human
driving behavior can be emulated in the mobile robot. The method
combines a fuzzy steering controller, which controls the steering
angle of the mobile robot for path tracking, and fuzzy velocity
controller which controls the forward linear velocity of the mobile
robot for safe path tracking. The inputs to the fuzzy system are
given by the vision system of the mobile robot. A camera is used
to capture images of the path ahead of the mobile robot and the
vision system determines the lateral offset, heading error and the
curvature of the path. We perform experiments using a mobile
robot platform. In the first experiment the mobile robot is able
to successfully track a straight path. This shows the effectiveness
of the fuzzy steering controller. We also perform experiments on
paths containing curved sections. The fuzzy velocity controller
was able to command appropriate speed for safe tracking of the
path ahead of the robot. The effectiveness of the fuzzy velocity
controller is shown in this experiment.
I. I NTRODUCTION
In the area of mobile robot navigation, there exists many
problems that robotics researchers have addressed using dif-
ferent techniques. One such problem is the path tracking
problem where the mobile robot navigates by following a path
traced on the ground in the robot environment. Path tracking
problem is most relevant to mobile robots in industrial and
manufacturing environment as well as to mobile robots in
agriculture applications [1].
Several papers have addressed the problem of path tracking
for nonholonomic mobile robots e.g., [2], in which the authors
have attempted the trajectory tracking problem by designing
an adaptive tracking controller and [3], in which the authors
have successfully used the backstepping technique. Another
interesting approach is the sliding mode control approach [4] to
tracking in which the authors have represented the kinematics
of a nonholonomic mobile robot in polar coordinates. Recently
it has been noted that the mobile robot path tracking problem
has been addressed using vision based approaches [5]–[9],
that is using a vision sensor. Vision sensors can provide extra
information about the characteristics of the path ahead of the
mobile robot, instead of just determining whether the mobile
robot is to the left or right of the path as with infrared sensors.
In [7], the mobile robot approaches a target point whereby the
coordinate of the point is extracted from the image of the path.
Mobile robot path tracking can be compared to driving a
car along a road. The road consists of straight and curved
segments or bends. The driver has to control two parameters
of the vehicle in order to drive safely along the road. One of
parameters is the speed of the vehicle which can be controlled
by using the accelerator and the brake. The other parameter
is the heading of the vehicle which can be controlled using
the steering wheel. The experienced driver (expert) know how
to appropriately control the speed and steering of the vehicle
based on the road ahead of the vehicle. If the car approaches
a bend of some constant curvature then a constant amount of
steering must be applied to track the bend. The authors in [10]
referred to this exception handling. On a straight road however,
the driver may have to make fine adjustments to the steering
to keep the car on track, and may increase the speed of the
car. This was referred to as compensation control in [10].
An expert driver may make decisions based on a vague
set of rules such as “if aggressive steering is required then
reduce speed” or “if gentle steering is required, then increase
speed” or “if bend is narrow then reduce speed”. To handle
such vagueness in information, perhaps the most appropriate
solution to path tracking problem is by using a fuzzy logic
based approach. In fact, research in autonomous highway
driving has also considered using fuzzy logic based approach.
The authors in [10] have used a fuzzy logic controller to
control the steering of a car for autonomous highway driving.
The dynamic model of the mobile robot is highly non-linear
and it is further affected by undesired effects such as wheel
slippage, gear backlash and sensor noise. A fuzzy logic based
controller is well suited for non-linear control applications as
the dynamic model of the plant is not required. For this reason
and because fuzzy logic based controller is easier to design and
implement, many authors e.g., in [9] have used this approach
for path tracking of mobile robots. The authors in [11], used a
fuzzy inference system (FIS) to control the advancing velocity
of the mobile robot to successfully track a path.
This paper focuses on mobile robot navigation problem,
in particular solving the problem of autonomously tracking
a continuous path traced on the ground in the mobile robot
environment. We explore a fuzzy logic based approach mainly
because human driving behavior can be emulated using simple
fuzzy control rules and since no explicit dynamics model of
the mobile robot is required in this approach. In our approach
the images of the path ahead of the robot is captured using a

ω c
P
v
y el
b x
ϕ l
θ
x algorithm
Fig. 1. Top view sketch of the differential drive robot
camera. The characteristics of the path ahead of the robot is
determined by the vision system of the robot. The proposed
method allows the mobile robot to accurately and safely track
the path ahead of it by controlling the steering angle and
forward linear speed of the robot.
II. M ODELING
A. Mobile Robot Model
The proposed method is developed for a differential drive
mobile robot. Fig. 1 shows a sketch of the top view of the
mobile robot and all the relevant parameters of the robot.
The mobile robot has two active wheels at the front, powered
independently and a free wheeling swivel caster to support the
mobile platform at the rear of the robot. The mobile robot
is able to steer towards the left or the right by differentially
varying the left and the right wheel velocities. If the left and
the right wheels turn in tandem, then the mobile robot moves
in a straight line.
The kinematic equations describing the model is given in
(1). We assume that the masses and the inertia of the wheels
are negligible. The position (x, y) of the mobile robot in the
world cartesian coordinate system is taken from the middle of
the axis connecting the centers of the two front wheels. We
assume also that this is the center of mass of the mobile robot.
v is the magnitude of the forward linear velocity of the mobile
robot at the center of mass, θ is the orientation of the mobile
robot with respect to the positive horizontal axis of the world
coordinate system and ω is the angular velocity of the mobile
robot about a point on the axis of connecting the centers of
the two front wheels, e.g., point P .
ẋ = v cos(θ)
ẏ = v sin(θ)
θ̇ = ω (1)
The mobile robot is subjected to a nonholonomic constraint.
As described through the equation in (2), the mobile robot is
unable to move laterally along the axis connecting the center
of the two front wheels of the mobile robot.
ẋ sin(θ) − ẏ cos(θ) = 0 (2)
The motion of the mobile robot can be controlled by the the
parameters v and ω, which are the linear and angular velocities
y 1
eh
L
Fig. 2. Sketch showing the parameters of the path used in the proposed
of the mobile robot respectively. However, for mobile robot
navigation problems such as path tracking, a more appropriate
variable to control would be steering angle, instead of angular
velocity. Thus, we define the steering angle, ϕ, as the angle
the rear caster makes with respect to the lateral center of the
mobile robot, l distance away from the axis of the center
of mass as shown in Fig. 1. The steering angle and angular
velocity of the robot is related using the equation in (3), where
ϕ is subjected to the kinematic limit − π2 < ϕ < π2 .
v
ω = tan(ϕ) (3)
l
B. Vision Dynamics
Our proposed path tracking method is for both straight and
curved paths of unknown curvature traced on the ground in the
mobile robot environment. The top view of the mobile robot
and the path is shown in Fig. 2, where y is the lateral position
of the center of the path with respect to the mobile robot and
x is the distance ahead of the mobile robot in the direction the
mobile robot. The thick line represents the path traced on the
ground. The vision system of the robot is used to extract the
line traced on the ground from images of the path ahead of the
robot captured by a camera. From the extracted path, the vision
system determines the lateral offset el which is the distance
between the lateral center of the mobile robot and the center
of the path at a distance of L ahead of the mobile robot. The
heading error eh is the difference between the current heading
of the mobile robot and the direction of the tangent line to
the path L distance away from the mobile robot. The vision
system is also used to extract the curvature, c, of the bend in
the path ahead of the mobile robot. The lateral and heading
errors and the curvature of the path ahead of the robot is used
as inputs into our proposed algorithm.
III. P ROPOSED PATH T RACKING M ETHOD
The proposed method combines a fuzzy steering controller
with a fuzzy velocity controller. The steering controller con-
trols the steering angle of the mobile robot, while the velocity
controller controls the forward linear velocity of the mobile
robot for safe tracking of a continuous path traced on the
ground ahead of the robot. A concise block diagram showing
the proposed mobile robot path tracking method is given in
Fig. 3. A camera captures the images of the path ahead of
the robot that is to be tracked. The captured path is relative
to the mobile robot since the camera is fixed to the mobile
robot. The vision system then by using image processing
 c̃

Actual
Vision el Fuzzy ϕ Fuzzy v Low Mobile Path
Steering Velocity Level
System eh Controller Controller Controller Robot

Camera

Fig. 3. Block diagram representation of the proposed path tracking method

techniques determines the lateral error and heading error of the Negative Positive
mobile robot. The lateral error is in meters whereas heading 1
error is in radians. The errors are inputs to the fuzzy steering
controller. The vision system of the mobile robot also estimates

membership
the curvature of the path ahead of the robot. The estimated
curvature is one of the inputs to the fuzzy velocity controller. 0.5
The output of the fuzzy steering controller and fuzzy velocity
controller is the steering angle and forward linear velocity
respectively. It can be noted that the outputs of the two fuzzy
controllers are reference inputs to the low level controller 0
which regulates the left and the right wheel velocities of −M 0 M
the mobile robot to achieve the reference linear velocity and error, change of error
steering angle. The following subsections gives details about
the design of the fuzzy steering and fuzzy velocity controller. Fig. 4. Membership function plots for error e1 (k) and change in error e2 (k)

A. Fuzzy Steering Control

that must be selected carefully. The degree of membership in
The fuzzy steering controller controls the steering angle sets positive and negative for each input can be computed as
of the mobile robot to accurately track the path traced on
0, for ej < −M

the ground in the mobile robot environment. The inputs to 
ej + M

the fuzzy steering controller are the lateral and heading errors µP (ej ) = (6)
, for −M ≤ ej ≤ M
defined in the previous section. Both of the errors are combined  2M

in (4) to get the tracking error et of the mobile robot, where ēl 1, for ej > M
is the normalized lateral error and ēh is the normalized heading
error. α is a parameter which controls the sensitivity of the two and
errors. 1, for ej < −M


et (k) = αēl (k) + (1 − α)ēh (k) (4) 
−ej + M
µN (ej ) = , for −M ≤ ej ≤ M (7)
Using the tracking error in (4) we define the two linguistic  2M

0, for ej > M
variables for our fuzzy system as error and change of error.
To coherently explain our proposed method we will use the where j ∈ {1,2}.
notation e1 (k) for error and e2 (k) for change of error at k-th
discrete time step given as We use the Takagi-Sugeno (TS) type fuzzy controller struc-
ture for our steering controller as it is widely used in control
e1 (k) = et (k) applications and because of its computational advantages. The
e2 (k) = e1 (k) − e1 (k − 1) (5) fuzzy rules for the TS type fuzzy controller is in the IF...THEN
form as
The fuzzy controller has three computational steps which are
fuzzification, inference and defuzzification. In the fuzzification Ri : IF e1 (k) is A1i AND e2 (k) is A2i
step, the two input variables e1 (k) and e2 (k) are fuzzified THEN ui (k) = a0i + a1i e1 (k) + a2i e2 (k) (8)
into a degree of membership of the two sets, positive (P) and
negative (N). The two linguistic values, negative and positive where A1i , A2i ∈ {N, P} are the input fuzzy sets and i =
denotes that the error and change of error can be either negative 1, 2, ..., N where N is the number of fuzzy rules. For our
or positive. The membership function plot which is identical fuzzy steering controller, there are two inputs and each of the
for error and change of error is given in Fig. 4. A combination inputs have two fuzzy sets. Thus, the total number of rules,
of triangle and trapezoidal membership functions are used for N = 4. The TS fuzzy rules in (8) suffers from a large number
simplicity of controller design and ease of computation of of parameters which need to be selected carefully or tuned for
membership values. The parameter M is a design parameter good performance. We use the simplified version of the TS
 TABLE I. TS FUZZY RULE BASE
fuzzy rules [12] where it is assumed that a0i = 0, and the
consequent part of the fuzzy rules are simplified as Rule No. (i) e1 (k) e2 (k) ui (k)
1 Positive Positive u1 (k) = (a1 e1 (k) + a2 e2 (k))
u1 (k) = p1 (a1 e1 (k) + a2 e2 (k)) 2 Positive Negative u2 (k) = 0
u2 (k) = p2 u1 (k) 3 Negative Positive u3 (k) = 0
4 Negative Negative u4 (k) = (a1 e1 (k) + a2 e2 (k))
u3 (k) = p3 u1 (k)
u4 (k) = p4 u1 (k) (9)
This reduces the number of parameters to be selected to six,
which are p1 , p2 , p3 , p4 , a1 and a2 . 10
In the inference step the antecedent part of the fuzzy rules
are combined to compute the firing strength of each rule. We

use the algebraic product for the fuzzy AND operation to
compute the firing strength of each rule as
Φi = µA1i (e1 (k))µA2i (e2 (k)) (10)
where Φi is the firing strength of rule i and µA1i is the degree
of membership of input e2 (k) in set A1i and µA2i is the degree
of membership of the input e2 (k) in set A2i . The crisp steering
angle output is computed in the defuzzification step. We used
the popular weighted average method given in (11) to compute
the crisp value of the steering angle. It can be noted that due to
the structure of the membership function for error and change
of error, the denominator in (11) is always one. The structure
of the fuzzy steering controller is similar to the fuzzy PD
controller with variable proportional and derivative gains [13].
PN
Φi ui (k)
ϕ(k) = i=1 PN (11)
i=1 Φi
The values of the parameters of the fuzzy steering con-
troller are chosen as follows. We choose M = 1 since the error
and change of error can be normalized in the range [−1, 1]. The
parameters p1 = p4 = 1 and p2 = p3 = 0. The explanation
behind this choice is as follows. The choice of these variables
resulted in the simplest steering angle control rules. If error
and change of error are both positive, then it means that the
path is to the left of the robot and the robot is moving further
towards the right away from the path. Therefore, the controller
output must approach the positive maximum value of steering
angle to steer the robot towards the left to track the path.
Similarly, if error and change of error are both negative, then
it means that the path is to the right of the robot and the
robot is moving further away from the path towards the left.
In this case the controller output must approach the negative
maximum value of the steering angle to steer the robot towards
the right to track the path. However, if error is positive and
change of error is negative, then the controller steering angle
output must approach zero as the mobile robot is in the process
of moving towards the path. The same is the case if error
is negative and change of error is positive. It must be noted
that the human driving behavior is reflected in the four cases
discussed here. The fuzzy rule base given in Table I shows all
the N = 4 possible rules of the fuzzy inference system. We
set the parameters a1 = 9.00 and a2 = −0.02. This is based
on several experiments. The four simple control rules can be
visually seen in the three dimensional non-linear controller
surface in Fig. 5.
The optimal values of the parameters a1 and a2 can be
obtained by using an offline optimization algorithm. In such
ϕ
0
−10
1
1
0 0.5
0
e2 −0.5
−1−1 e1
Fig. 5. Non-linear control surface of the steering fuzzy controller
case, a dynamic model of the mobile robot needs to be made
and a suitable method of optimization needs to be selected.
There are other factors such as the optimization criteria or the
fitness function needs to be obtained and constrains need to
be set as tunning fuzzy controller parameters is a constrained
optimization problem. In addition, the optimization method
itself has several parameters that needs to be selected carefully.
Optimization of the controller parameters requires experience
and time. The optimization of the fuzzy controller parameters
is outside the scope of this work. However, we can confirm that
the parameters that we selected resulted in a stable controller.
B. Fuzzy Velocity Control
The fuzzy velocity controller compensates for the increase
in the angular velocity above the kinematic limit of the mobile
robot by appropriately reducing the forward linear velocity of
the mobile robot. There are two inputs to the fuzzy velocity
controller which are steering and bend. The linguistic variable
steering refers to the amount of steering angle applied by the
fuzzy steering controller. The steering angle of the mobile
robot can be used to determine the angular velocity of the
robot at current forward velocity using the equation in (3).
A kinematic limit on the angular velocity ωmax , of the mobile
robot such that |ω| ≤ ωmax brings to an upper limit the steering
angle ϕ, such that |ϕ| ≤ ϕmax , to maintain the angular velocity
limit of the mobile robot at current forward linear velocity.
v
ωmax = tan(ϕmax ) (12)
l
However, the fuzzy steering controller may command a greater
steering angle to track an upcoming bend in the mobile robot
path. The linguistic variable steering then refers to the amount
by which the commanded steering angle exceeds ϕmax , and is
given by ∆ϕ in (13).
∆ϕ = |ϕ| − ϕmax (13)
 Gentle Appropriate Aggressive Wide Medium Narrow
1 1

membership

membership
0.5 0.5

0 0
−1.0 −0.5 0 0.5 1.0 0 0.5 1.0
steering (∆ϕ) bend (c̄)

Fig. 6. Membership function for steering Fig. 7. Membership function for bend

TABLE II. F UZZY RULE BASE OF THE VELOCITY CONTROLLER

If the output of the fuzzy steering controller, ϕ, is equal in
magnitude to ϕmax , then ∆ϕ = 0. Therefore, positive values
of ∆ϕ indicates that an aggressive steering is applied by the
steering controller and it will result in the vehicle exceeding the
angular velocity limit, at current linear velocity v. Therefore,
the velocity controller must compensate by reducing the linear
velocity to keep the angular velocity of the mobile robot
within the safe kinematic limits. The membership function
for the input variable steering is shown in Fig. 6. It takes
on the linguistic variables gentle, appropriate and aggressive
to indicate the three levels of steering applied by the fuzzy
steering controller.
A second input to the fuzzy velocity controller is an
estimate of the normalized curvature of the upcoming bend
ahead of the vehicle. The linguistic variable bend, refers to
the value of the normalized curvature of the upcoming bend,
and it can have the linguistic values wide, medium and narrow.
The normalized curvature, c̄, is given as
|c̃|
c̄ =
cmax
where cmax is the maximum curvature of the bend which can
be tracked by the mobile robot, and c̃ is the estimated curvature
given by the vision system of the robot. The maximum
curvature of the path that the mobile robot can track at its
current velocity v is determined by the angular velocity limit
ωmax of the mobile robot given as
ωmax
cmax = (15)
v later section. We set the angular velocity limit of the mobile
The membership function of the bend input is given in
Fig. 7. A wide bend will have a very small curvature value,
approaching zero, while a narrow bend will have a curvature
approaching cmax .
We defined the output of the fuzzy velocity controller as the
velocity scaling factor vsf which is in the range [0.2, 1.0], used
to scale the forward linear velocity of the mobile robot. Three
singletons are used as outputs of the velocity controller. The
linguistic variables representing the output are low, medium
and high. The chosen numerical constant values of the three
linguistic variables are 0.2, 0.5 and 1.0 respectively. The rule
base of the fuzzy velocity controller is given in Table II. The
rule base was designed to emulate human driving behavior
such as “If steering is aggressive and bend is narrow, Then
speed is low”. The fuzzy velocity controller has two inputs
∆ϕ
vsf
Gentle Appropriate Aggressive
Wide high high medium
c̄ Medium high medium low
Narrow medium low low
with three fuzzy sets each. Thus, there is a total of nine rules.
The fuzzy AND product operation is used to combine the
membership degrees of the antecedent part of the rules to
obtain the firing strength of each rule. Defuzzification is by
the use of the weighted average method to obtain the crisp vsf
output from the fuzzy system.
IV. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS
A. Setup
1) Mobile Robot Platform: The mobile robot platform that
was used to test our path tracking algorithm is shown in Fig. 8.
This platform was assembled using various mechanical and
(14)
electronic parts. The physical parameters of the mobile robot
are as follows. With reference to Fig. 1 the wheel base, b of the
mobile robot is 0.33 m and l which is the distance between the
rear caster center and the center of the front wheel is 0.30 m.
The radius of the front wheel of the mobile robot is 0.06 m. In
addition, we set some kinematic limits of the mobile platform.
In all our experiments the linear forward velocity of the mobile
robot, v = 0.2 m/s. This is set taking into consideration the
low sampling rate of the video acquisition system explained in
robot, ωmax = 1.0 rads/s. We set the parameter which controls
the sensitivity of the lateral and heading error α = 0.85. This is
based on several experiments that we conducted with different
α values.
The mobile platform contains two modular motor system
to drive the left and the right wheels of the robot. The modular
motor system consists of DC motor, gear-head, encoder sensor
and controller. The controller of the modular system features
a build in low level PI speed controller running at 56 kHz
sampling rate. The controller speed input is commanded using
a PWM signal generated by the 32-bit microcontroller running
on ARM Cortex M3 core. The microcontroller receives refer-
ence speed commands for the left and the right wheel from
our path tracking algorithm. The algorithm was programmed
using MATLAB running on a notebook computer.
 Fig. 9. Original image of the path taken by the on-board camera
Fig. 8. Mobile robot platform

is a translation vector connecting the world coordinate system

2) Vision System: Image data is acquired using a low cost to the camera fixed frame. Both R and t are the extrinsic
USB camera (webcam) mounted on the mobile robot. The parameters of the camera. A MATLAB camera calibration
CMOS camera is connected to a notebook computer running toolbox [14] inspired by [15] was used to find the intrinsic
MATLAB. Images are acquired using the Image Acquisition camera parameters. The camera matrix which contains the
Toolbox at a frame rate of 7 Hz. The image size is 640 × 480 intrinsic calibration parameters was found to be
pixels. We assume a pinhole camera model for the vision
728 0 371
 
system. In this model we define f c = [fc1 , fc2 ]T ∈ R2 , as the
effective focal lengths of the camera and cc = [cc1 , cc2 ]T ∈ R2 K= 0 728 237 (21)
as the principal point, both of which are in pixels. A point 0 0 1
P in the camera reference frame has the coordinates pc =
[xc , yc , zc ]T ∈ R3 . The projection of point P onto the image The values have been rounded off to the nearest integer. The
plane is given by pixel error was sufficiently low thus the parameters were
accepted. To find the extrinsic parameters, an image of the
xc /zc xn
   
pn = = (16) checkerboard pattern was captured by carefully placing the
yc /zc yn printed checkerboard pattern on the ground on which the white
line to be followed by the robot was traced. The ground on
which is known as the normalized projection. The same point
which white path is traced is flat. The camera was fixed to the
in pixel coordinates is given by
robot and all the path tracking experiments were conducted by
using the same fixed position of the camera. From this image
xp fc1 0
  
pp = = p + cc (17) and using the intrinsic parameters found earlier, the extrinsic
yp 0 fc2 n parameters were found using the camera calibration toolbox.
The extrinsic parameters were found to be
Using homogeneous coordinates for pp , (17) can also be
expressed as 
−0.0002 −1.0000 0.0056

xp xn
   
R = −0.4610 −0.0049 −0.8874
 yp  = K  yn  (18) 0.8874 −0.0028 −0.4610
1 1  
−11.8299
where t =  −2.5442  (22)
fc1 0 cc1
 
364.5480
K= 0 fc2 cc2  (19)
0 0 1
Using the extrinsic parameters found, the images of the lane
is a 3 × 3 camera matrix, which contains the intrinsic pa- taken was projected from image pixel coordinates to ground
rameters of the camera such as focal lengths and principal plane. The projection on ground plane was in millimeters,
point. Moreover, a point p = [x, y, z]T ∈ R3 in a different but later converted to meters. A sample image of the path
reference frame or world coordinates can be transformed into taken during experiments is shown in the Fig. 9. The pixel
image coordinates by the relation coordinates of the midpoint of the path was extracted from the
image and these coordinates were projected onto the ground
x
 
xp
  plane as shown in Fig. 10. Note that the image processing
y  techniques for extraction of the path is out of the scope of
 yp  = K[R t]   (20)
z  this paper. We also consider the radial and tangential lens
1 distortion into account when computing the projections. From
1
this projection we estimated the parameters such as the value
where R ∈ R3×3 is a rotation matrix from the world of curvature in the bend ahead of the mobile robot, the lateral
coordinate system to the camera reference frame, and t ∈ R3 error and the heading error by fitting a cubic polynomial
 robot position
0.4 0.4
actual path

0.2
0.2

y (m)
0
y (m)

0
−0.2
−0.2
−0.4
−0.4
0 0.5 1 1.5 2
x (m)
−0.2 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
x (m)
Fig. 12. The position (x, y) of the mobile robot in relation to the actual path
traced on the ground for straight path tracking
Fig. 10. Projection of the points owning to the path onto ground plane. These
points are shown as red squares. The trapezoid shows the area of the ground
captured by the camera. The blue line is the curve that has been fit through 1.5 3.33 m−1
the points owning to the path. 2.00 m−1
1.43 m−1
el 1
0.1 eh

y (m)
0 0.5
error

−0.1 0

0 0.5 1 1.5 2
−0.2 x (m)

0 2 4 6 8 10 12 Fig. 13. The trajectory followed by the mobile robot while tracking three
t (sec) different path containing bend of different curvatures

Fig. 11. Lateral (el ) and heading (eh ) error of the mobile robot for tracking
a straight path
through the points and using the model of the path described
in [16].
B. Straight Path Tracking
Our first experiment was tracking a straight path traced
on the ground. The initial position of the mobile robot was
about 0.1 meters offset from the path on the ground. The
lateral error and the heading error for a duration of about 12
seconds is shown in Fig. 11. It can be seen that the lateral
error approached zero in about 2 seconds. It must also be
noted there is no overshoot in the lateral position error. This
is a feature of the derivative term of the fuzzy PD controller.
The heading error also stabilized with very little overshoot
and is within ±1 %. The small error is encountered because
of the nonholonomic constrain of the mobile robot and because
more weight is given to the lateral error. The lateral error is in
meters while the heading error is in radians. The plot showing
the position of the mobile robot in relation to the tracked
path is given in Fig. 12. This plot was obtained by the use
of robot odometry only. Techniques such as dead reckoning
which involved setting the initial (x, y) position of the robot
as (0, 0) were used to obtain this plot.
C. Curved Path Tracking
We performed a series of experiments on curved paths of
different curvature value. In this experiment, a section of the
mobile robot path was curved and had a constant curvature
while the rest of the path was straight. We selected three dif-
ferent curvature values for the three paths. The three different
curvature values are 3.33 m−1 , 2.00 m−1 and 1.43 m−1 . The
curved section for each of the three paths started from the same
point. This can be seen from the combined plots in Fig. 13 for
each of the three trajectory taken by the mobile robot. The
path taken by the mobile robot was determined by the use of
odometry only. It was also assumed that initial position of the
mobile robot is (0, 0).
In addition, the velocity of the mobile robot for the duration
of the experiment for each of the three paths was also acquired.
The velocity is plotted in Fig. 14. The plots show that the
velocity of the mobile robot was reduced by the fuzzy velocity
controller while tracking the curved section of the path. It
can be noted from Fig. 13 that the curved section of the
path was encountered after about 1 m of straight path. At
a velocity of 0.2 m/s, the mobile robot approaches the bend
or the curved section after 5 seconds. Thus, to safely track
the curved section of the path the velocity fuzzy controller
reduces the linear forward velocity of the mobile robot. The
three plots in Fig. 14a, Fig. 14b and Fig. 14c shows the velocity
profile of the mobile robot for curvatures 3.33 m−1 , 2.00 m−1
 0.2 0.2 0.2

0.15 0.15 0.15

v (m/s)

v (m/s)

v (m/s)
0.1 0.1 0.1

0.05 0.05 0.05

0 0 0

0 5 10 15 0 5 10 15 0 5 10 15
t (sec) t (sec) t (sec)
(a) (b) (c)

Fig. 14. Forward linear velocity of the mobile robot while tracking a path of three different curvatures of (a) 3.33 m−1 (b) 2.00 m−1 and (c) 1.43 m−1

and 1.43 m−1 respectively. It can be seen that the greater the
curvature value, the more the velocity controller reduces the
linear forward velocity. After the mobile robot exits the curved
section, the velocity controller accelerates the mobile robot to
0.2 m/s.
V. C ONCLUSION
The contribution of this paper is summarized as follows.
We have proposed a fuzzy logic based method for autonomous
path tracking of a mobile robot. The proposed method is
designed using fuzzy rules that emulate human driving behav-
ior. The path tracking algorithm is for tracking straight and
curved paths of different curvatures. Path information such as
lateral position of the path with respect to the mobile robot,
the heading of the robot with respect to the direction of the
tangent line to the path and the curvature of the path ahead
of the robot is estimated by vision system of the robot using
images of the path captured by a camera. The fuzzy logic based
approach is taken by designing two fuzzy systems, one for
steering control and the other for velocity control. The steering
controller controls the steering angle of the mobile robot while
the velocity controller controls the forward linear velocity of
the mobile robot. Experiments are performed on a mobile robot
platform. The performance of the two combined controller
is shown through the experiments on different paths. Firstly,
the mobile robot is able to successfully track a straight path,
which shows the effectiveness of the fuzzy steering controller.
Secondly, the advantages of the fuzzy velocity controller is
shown by tracking a path with curved section. The fuzzy
velocity controller is able to reduce the velocity of the mobile
robot to safely track the bend in the path.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors wish to thank the Faculty Research Committee,
of Faculty of Science, Technology and Environment at the
University of the South Pacific for their grant of $5012.12
FJD under the vote code 6C373-1351-70306-00 towards this
study.
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