A backstepping approach to control a nonholonomic mobile robot

Abstract

A trajectory tracking control problem for a nonholonomic mobile robot by making use of a kinematic oscillator has been solved. Firstly, a time varying oscillator is examined to control the nonholonomic mobile robot based only its kinematics. Secondly, a backstepping procedure is proposed to include robot dynamics and the servo loop. It is shown that overall multilevel controller is asymptotically globally stable to a small error different from zero. A wide range of simulation results are presented which illustrate the behaviour of the controller with respect to tuning its parameters. Some preliminary experiments are reported too.