Strategy for designing a control system for a target-approach task by a mobile robot

This paper presents a strategy for designing a control system for the mobile robots which task is to approach a target from a specific direction. The strategy is based on the concept of virtual forces combined with actual, physical forces acting upon the system. The virtual potential force field is a concatenation of a spring force and a dipol-like force. An additional braking force, based on work-energy theorem, is introduced in order to obtain virtual damping effect. Because of force-based approach, the strategy focuses on dynamical systems. The concept has been tested via simulations.