Experimental implementation of a novel trajectory tracking control design on a full-sized nonholonomic tracked mobile robot with low-level velocities control systems

This paper presents experimental results of a novel trajectory tracking control design proposed in [21] for nonholonomic mobile robots. The mobile robots considered in this work are driven by low-level velocities control systems that possess non-trivial dynamical effects. The key trust of the tracking control design is that it can be implemented for the robots to track time-parameterized trajectories without the need of knowing the detailed dynamical models of the robots´ velocities control systems. This feature is useful when adequately accurate models of the robots´ low-level velocities control systems are difficult to obtain and the dynamical effects of the velocities controllers cannot be ignored. The tracking control design was implemented on a full-sized nonholonomic tracked mobile robot and experimented in some off-road environments with speeds up to 4.17m/sec. The obtained experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed tracking control scheme, showing that the proposed control design can perform effective and stable trajectory tracking control in the off-road environments. The experimental results also provide the basis for investigating further improvement at the operating speed envelope, and applying the control design to perform multiple mobile robots coordinated motion control for such mobile robots.