Understanding the Basics of Differential Robots

In the previous chapter, we discussed the basics of ROS, how to install it, and the basics of the Gazebo robot simulator. As we have already mentioned, we are going to create an autonomous wheeled robot from scratch. The robot that we are going to design is a differential drive robot, which involves having two wheels on opposite sides of the robot chassis, enabling the robot's direction to be adjusted by changing the speed of each of the two wheels.

It will be good to understand the basic ideas and terminology behind differential wheel robots before programming the robot. This chapter will give you an idea of how to analyze the robot mathematically and how to solve the robot's kinematics equation. The kinematics equation helps you to predict the robot's position from its sensor data.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Mathematical modeling of differential drive robots
• Forward kinematics of differential drive robots
• Inverse kinematics of differential drive robots