Discontinuous finite-time tracking controller of nonholonomic mobile
robots with unmeasurable velocity
Shang Shi
1
,XinYu
1
, Guohai Liu
1
1. School of Electrical and Information Engineering, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang, Jiangsu Province, 212013, China
E-mail: shishangshang@yahoo.com (S. Shi); xyu@ujs.edu.cn (X. Yu); ghliu@ujs.edu.cn (G. Liu)
Abstract: In this paper, finite-time tracking problem of mobile robots in the presence of unmeasurable velocities and
disturbances is studied. To accomplish this problem, the tracking error dynamic is transformed into two subsystems with
disturbances, and the two subsystems are discussed respectively. First, a discontinuous controller is designed to realize
finite-time tracking of mobile robots. Then, if the angular velocity is unmeasurable, a finite-time trajectory tracking
controller based on a state observer is presented. When the trajectory is special, a finite-time controller is proposed to
solve the tracking problem with unmeasurable angular and linear velocities. Finally we demonstrate the effectiveness of
our proposed controllers with simulation.
Key Words: Nonholonomic, Mobile Robot, Finite-time, Tracking, Unmeasurable Velocity
1 INTRODUCTION
Over the past decades, the control problem of nonholo-
nomic wheeled mobile robots has received much attention.
Due to the systems with nonholonomic constraints is un-
deractuated, the problems of stabilization and tracking are
different and challenging. For stabilization problem, ac-
cording to the Brockett’s theorem (see [1]), any smooth
or continuous time-invariant state feedback-control law can
not make nonholonomic systems asymptotically stable. To
solve this problem, many control methods have been pro-
posed, such as discontinuous control laws [2], smooth time-
varying control laws [3] and hybrid control laws [4]. For
tracking problem, there have been many results over the
last three decades (see [5]-[7] and the references therein).
To further investigate the control of nonholonomic wheeled
mobile robots, over the last ten years, finite time control
method has received compelling attention for its faster con-
vergence and better robustness (e.g., [8]). In [9], The uni-
form global finite-time stability is discussed for a cascad-
ed time-varying system consisting of two uniformly finite-
time stable subsystems. a finite time tracking design for
nonholonomic chained systems was proposed in [10]. [11]
designed a cascaded control method to realize finite-time
tracking. Literature [12] solved tracking problem with a
cascaded control design similar to [11] for nonholonomic
wheeled mobile robots with dynamic model.
However, the most existing controllers contain the veloc-
ity signals of mobile robots. But the velocity sensor may
broke down for some noise or there may have no these de-
vices at all for their expensive cost. The asymptotic track-
This work is supported by National Nature Science Founda-
tion (61304073), Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province
(BK20130533), China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2014T70478),
Specialized Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education
of China (20133227120012), the Priority Academic Program Developm-
ent of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions
ing problem was addressed via a partial state-feedback con-
troller with angle observer in [14]. Literature [15] solved
both asymptotic tracking and stabilization simultaneously
via designing a time-varying output-feedback controller for
unicycle-type mobile robots. In [16], an adaptive output-
feedback tracking controller is proposed for nonholonomic
mobile robots which can only guarantee that the tracking
errors are confined to an arbitrarily small ball.
In this paper, finite-time tracking problem for nonholonom-
ic mobile robots without velocity measurement is studied.
To solve this problem, the tracking error dynamic is trans-
formed into two subsystems with disturbances, and these
two subsystems are discussed respectively. To prepare for
the observer-based feedback control, a discontinuous state-
feedback control law is designed, which guarantees finite-
time tracking of mobile robots. When the angular velocity
is unmeasurable, a state observer i s designed, and based
on the observer, a finite-time trajectory tracking controller
is presented. When both the angular and linear velocities
are unmeasurable, under a strict assumption, the finite-time
trajectory tracking control problem is solved based on two
finite-time observers.
The rest of this paper is arranged as follows. Section 2
presents the dynamic model and control objective of non-
holonomic wheeled mobile robot. Section 3 gives the finite
time tracking controller design, which are the main results
of the paper. Simulation results are given in Section 4 and
finally conclusion is drawn in Section 5.
2 Problem Formulation
In this section, the dynamic model and control objective of
nonholonomic wheeled mobile robot will be introduced.
2.1 Dynamic Model
The schematic of considered mobile robot is shown in Fig.
1. The generalized coordinates are 𝑞 =(𝑥, 𝑦, 𝜃), where
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