A system decomposition method for region tracking control of a non‐holonomic mobile robot with dynamic parameter uncertainties

Abstract

The tracking control problem of non‐holonomic mobile robot systems has been extensively investigated in the past decades, however, most of the existing control strategies were developed specifically for the fixed‐point tracking. This technical note focuses on the region tracking control for a non‐holonomic mobile robot system with parameter uncertainties in the robot dynamics. With the system decomposition and adaptive control method, some restrictions imposed on the angular and linear velocities of the non‐holonomic mobile robot in recent literature are removed, enabling to track dynamic trajectories with any values of the angular and line velocities. The proposed adaptive control scheme can simultaneously solve both the regulation and region tracking problems of a non‐holonomic mobile robot with one passive wheel and two actuated wheels. By utilizing the designed control laws, the mobile robot system is able to globally reach inside a moving region specified by potential functions whose path can be a circular curve, a straight line, or sinusoidal curve, by using a single adaptive controller. Since the dynamic region can be specified arbitrarily small, the fixed‐point tracking can be regarded as a special case of region tracking studied in this paper. Compared with the traditional fixed‐point tracking, region tracking has more flexibility and better robustness. Numerical results are presented to show the effectiveness of the designed strategy.