ORIGINAL ARTICLE Feasibility assessment of Kian-I mobile robot for autonomous navigation Amin Abbasi 1 • Somaiyeh MahmoudZadeh 2 • Amirmehdi Yazdani 3 • Ata Jahangir Moshayedi 4 Received: 22 June 2021 / Accepted: 17 August 2021 / Published online: 3 September 2021 Ó The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2021 Abstract A two-wheeled mobile robot, namely Kian-I, is designed and prototyped in this research. The Kian-I is comparable with Khepera-IV in terms of dimensional specifications, mounted sensors, and performance capabilities and can be used for educational purposes and cost-effective experimental tests. A motion control architecture is designed for Kian-I in this study to facilitate accurate navigation for the robot in an immersive environment. The implemented control structure consists of two main components of the path recommender system and trajectory tracking controller. Given partial knowledge about the operation field, the path recommender system adopts B-spline curves and particle swarm optimization algorithm to determine a collision-free path curve with translational velocity constraint. The provided optimal reference path feeds into the trajectory tracking controller enabling Kian-I to navigate autonomously in the operating field. The trajectory tracking module eliminates the error between the desired path and the followed trajectory through controlling the wheels’ velocity. To assess the feasibility of the proposed control architecture, the performance of Kian-I robot in autonomous navigation from any arbitrary initial pose to a target of interest is evaluated through numerous simulation and experimental studies. The experimental results demonstrate the functional capacities and performance of the prototyped robot to be used as a benchmark for investigation and verification of various mobile robot algorithms in the laboratory environment. Keywords Kian-I mobile robot  Path recommender system  Trajectory tracking  Autonomy  Motion controller 1 Introduction Two-wheeled robots have diverse applications due to their high versatility, mobility, and agility in both indoor and outdoor environments. An autonomous robot should be capable of positioning, localization, and autonomous nav- igation with minimum position calibration error to mitigate the challenges of real-world experiments, which is known as the navigation autonomy. The level of autonomy in mobiles robots is a direct function of hardware specifica- tions including geometrical design, navigation aids, and computational power in conjunction with the software specifications that are mission and motion planning archi- tectures and their functionalities. In this research, an affordable cost two-wheeled mobile robot, namely Kian-I, is designed, developed, and proto- typed. The aim is to benefit form a functional and cost- effective mobile robot as a benchmark for educational purposes in particular for investigation and verification of & Somaiyeh MahmoudZadeh S.MahmoudZadeh@deakin.edu.au Amin Abbasi AminAbbasi.res@gmail.com Amirmehdi Yazdani Amirmehdi.Yazdani@murdoch.edu.au Ata Jahangir Moshayedi ajm@jxust.edu.cn 1 Department of Electrical Engineering, Azad University of Khoemeinishar, Esfaha¯n, Iran 2 School of IT, Deakin University, Geelong, VIC 3220, Australia 3 College of Science, Health, Engineering and Education, Murdoch University, Perth, WA 6150, Australia 4 School of Information Engineering, Jiangxi University of Science and Technology, Ganzhou 341000, Jiangxi, China 123 Neural Computing and Applications (2022) 34:1199–1218 https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-021-06428-2