Experimental Verification for Adaptive Tracking Control of a Nonholonomic Mobile Robot

A mobile robot is suitable for a variety of applications in unstructured environments where a high degree of autonomy is required. It is one of typical systems with nonholonomic constraints, and many researchers have devoted their efforts on its tracking control. In this paper, an adaptive controller is proposed for tracking control of a nonholonomic mobile robot with consideration of unknown model parameters. This design does not need precise knowledge of the inertia matrix, Coriolis and centrifugal force. The close loop stability is proved by using the Lyapunov technique. The effectiveness of the proposed controller is demonstrated by experiments conducted on our mobile robot platform.