Wall-following control of a two-wheeled mobile robot

Abstract

Wall-following control problem for a mobile robot is to move it along a wall at a constant speed and keep a specified distance to the wall.This paper proposes wall-following controllers based on Lyapunov function candidate for a two-wheeled mobile robot (MR) to follow an unknown wall. The mobile robot is considered in terms of kinematic model in Cartesian coordinate system. Two wall-following feedback controllers are designed: full state feedback controller and observer-based controller. To design the former controller, the errors of distance and orientation of the mobile robot to the wall are defined, and the feedback controller based on Lyapunov function candidate is designed to guarantee that the errors converge to zero asymptotically. The latter controller is designed based on Busawon’s observer as only the distance error is measured. Additionally, the simulation and experimental results are included to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed controllers.