Robust tracking and regulation control for mobile robots

This paper presents the design of a new, differentiable kinematic control law that utilizes a damped dynamic oscillator with a tunable frequency of oscillation to achieve global uniformly ultimately bounded tracking (i.e., the position/orientation tracking errors globally exponentially converge to a neighbourhood about zero that can be made arbitrarily small). In contrast to many of the previously developed kinematic tracking controllers, the proposed controller can be used for the regulation problem as well; hence, a unified framework is provided for both the tracking and the regulation problem. To compensate for uncertainty in the dynamic model, we illustrate how the kinematic controller can be used to design a robust nonlinear controller. Experimental results are presented to demonstrate the performance of the proposed controller. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.