15th Triennial World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control
  Barcelona, 21–26 July 2002 
COMBINED TRAJECTORY TRACKING AND PATH FOLLOWING CONTROL FOR DYNAMIC WHEELED MOBILE ROBOTS
P. Encarnação     A. Pascoal
Institute for Systems and Robotics and Dept. Electrical Eng.
Instituto Superior Técnico
Av. Rovisco Pais, 1, 1049-001 Lisboa, Portugal
Fax: +351-218418291
E-mail:{pme,antonio}@isr.ist.utl.pt

The paper presents a solution to the problem of combined trajectory tracking and path following system design for underactuated mobile robots with non negligible dynamics. This problem is motivated by the practical need to develop control systems for mobile robots that can yield good trajectory tracking performance while keeping some of the properties that are normally associated with path following. The solution described builds on and extends previous work by Hindman and Hauser on so-called maneuver modified trajectory tracking. Simulations with a full nonlinear model of a wheeled mobile robot illustrate the performance of the control system derived.
Keywords: Trajectory Tracking. Path Following Systems. Nonlinear Control. Backstepping Techniques
Session slot T-Tu-E05: Intelligent Autonomous Vehicles II/Area code 8f : Intelligent Autonomous Vehicles