Full-state tracking and internal dynamics of nonholonomic wheeled mobile robots

In the paper, the stable full-state tracking problem is investigated for nonholonomic wheeled mobile robots under output-tracking control laws. Dynamics of such wheeled mobile robots are nonholonomic and pose challenging problems for control design and stability analysis. The dynamics formulated in terms of full-state tracking errors offer some properties that allow better understanding of the internal and zero dynamics of the tracking-error system and more insights to the trajectory tracking stability. Output functions are chosen as virtual reference points for various types of wheeled mobile robots in aid of output controller designs. Sufficient conditions are derived to ensure the stable full-state trajectory tracking under output-tracking control laws. A type (1,1) mobile robot of car-like configuration is studied in detail and further numerical analysis provides more results which are beyond the reach of analytical means. An example and simulation results are presented to confirm the theory and observations.