Control of two-steering-wheels vehicles with the Transverse Function approach

The control of a wheeled vehicle with front and rear steering wheels is addressed. With respect to more classical car-like vehicles, an advantage of this type of mechanism is its enhanced maneuverability. The Transverse Function approach is used to derive feedback laws which ensure practical stabilization of arbitrary reference trajectories in the cartesian space, and asymptotic stabilization when the trajectory is feasible by the nonholonomic vehicle. Concerning this latter issue, previous results are extended to the case of transverse functions defined on the Special Orthogonal Group SO(3).