Lyapunov-based environmental boundary tracking control of mobile robots

This paper considers the environmental boundary tracking problem where the objective is to steer a mobile robot to track the desired environmental boundary. Based on the kinematic model of the mobile robot, we design a kinematic control law for the robot to track the desired boundary. Kinematic control law needs perfect velocity tracking, which doesn´t always hold for a mobile robot. So, dynamic control law is designed for the nonholonomic mobile robot to track a designated reference velocity, so as to track the desired environmental boundary. The stability of the designed control laws is verified by Lyapunov theory and Barbalat´s Lemma and illustrated by simulation results.