Inversion-based control of wheeled mobile robots

A new motion planning approach is proposed for the iterative steering of wheeled mobile robots. Taking into account the nonholonomy of the adopted unicycle model, this approach permits the real-time generation of continuous-acceleration controls within a supervisory control architecture for sensor-based autonomous navigation. The motion planning is actually performed by a dynamic inversion procedure that exploits the new concept of G³-paths, i.e. Cartesian paths with third order geometric continuity (both the curvature function and its derivative with respect to the arc length are continuous). A worked example considering an hypothetical docking problem illustrates the approach.