Feedback control design of differential-drive wheeled mobile robots

The control system design of differential-drive wheeled robots in the approach of approximate feedback linearization is presented in this paper. A differential-drive wheeled mobile robot is a highly nonlinear multi-input/multi-output system. Traditional techniques can not result in a control system design with satisfactory performance. In this paper, we propose to reasonably choose the state variables so that the control design can be implemented in the sense of approximate linearization. To assess the proposed method for control of differential-driven mobile robot, we compare its performance with that under a conventional linearised controller. Simulation results demonstrate that the approximate feedback linearization can provide much better performance than the normal linearized control system design