A comparative study of two trajectory tracking controllers for an autonomous robot vehicle

This work presents a comparative study between the performance of a pair of controllers designed to solve the trajectory tracking problem of a robot vehicle on a practical platform. The considered vehicle is the well-known robot called unicycle which presents three degrees of freedom (position and orientation). This robot is actuated through a pair of dc motors which independently drive two lateral wheels without sleeping. One of the studied controllers is developed using an unified navigation/control scheme based on Lyapunov techniques and standard controllers (PID). The other control approach is obtained using a theoretical framework extracted from linear algebra issues. The closed loop performance of both controllers is compared and analysed through real experimental tests.