Traveling Control of a Nonholonomic Mobile Robot

Nonholonomic systems are becoming popular in the field of robotics and nonlinear control recently. This paper describes control of a nonholonomic mobile robot that is the first order nonholonomic system. Time-state control form is one of the useful methods to control such systems. We constructed a mobile robot with two independently drivable wheels and applied the algorithm to control it. The hardware architecture of the robot is very simple. Two wheels are driven by two stepping motors with no encoder. State variables that are necessary to evaluate control inputs are measured by using the odometry method. As the mobile robot is constructed with moderate cost, sensing resolution of the velocity is relatively low. While we confirmed that time-state control form has some degree of robustness to noise. Then, even in the limited condition, the nonholonomic mobile robot can be well controlled by making use of those algorithms. Performance of the system has been illustrated by experiments