A novel non-time based tracking controller for nonholonomic mobile robots

Event based controller design was first proposed by Xi (1993), where a suitable non-time motion reference is introduced to represent the desired and measurable system output. It has been successfully applied to many areas such as robot motion control, multi-robot coordination, force and impact control, robotic teleoperation and manufacturing automation. In this paper, a non-time based tracking controller for a nonholonomic mobile robot is proposed by combining the conventional event based control technique with a biologically inspired additive model first proposed by Grossberg (1982). The proposed control algorithm can generate the smooth and continuous velocity control commands, which remove the small tracking error constraints in the conventional non-time based controllers. The stability of the control system and convergence of the tracking errors are guaranteed. The effectiveness of the proposed controller is demonstrated by simulation and comparison studies.