In this work design of a mobile robot is presented, which is used as laboratory tool to test various control algorithms. This work also presents a variable control structure for the mobile robot. The internal control scheme uses a PID controller to control the motors angular speed, while the external loop is associated to the kinematic model of the robot and is also responsible to generate the reference velocity trajectory for each motor. The proposed control uses two types of state feedback control algorithms, which are switched from one to another at the point one encounters with a singularity.