Trajectory tracking of wheeled mobile robots using only Cartesian position measurements

Abstract

The problem of trajectory tracking of nonholonomic wheeled mobile robots has been extensively studied in the last decades. Nevertheless, most of the control laws proposed in the literature assume full state measurements. Based on the flatness property of the robot’s kinematic model, we proposed a dynamic feedback linearization controller in combination with attitude and velocity observers. The proposed control-observer scheme requires only Cartesian position measurements and achieves asymptotic trajectory tracking. The stability analysis is carried out by means of Lyapunov’s theory and the properties of cascade time-varying systems. Experimental results are presented to show the performance of the proposed approach.