Adaptive tracking control design of nonholonomic mechanical systems

This paper addresses the problem of designing adaptive tracking controls for nonholonomic mechanical systems under plant uncertainties and external disturbances. Both dynamic state feedback as well as output feedback tracking control laws will be constructed. A dynamic output feedback controller based on a linear and reduced-order observer is proposed, for the first time, to treat the adaptive tracking design for uncertain nonholonomic mechanical control systems using only position measurements. Then, we shall show that the influence of the external disturbance on the tracking motion error can be attenuated to an arbitrarily pre-assigned level, that is, an H^∞ tracking performance is achieved