A motion planning approach to fast parking control of mobile robots

This paper studies the general parking problem for unicycle-modeled mobile robots by combining the motion planning method with tracking controller design. We add a re-designed virtual trajectory to the original trajectory such that the parking problem can be transformed into a tracking problem. Consequently, a new global tracking controller is proposed to achieve the locally exponential convergence. Further improvement of the tracking performance is achieved using linearization and pole placement method. The proposed controllers are quite simple and can be easily implemented. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated by several interesting experiments including the parallel parking and the back-into-garage parking.