Waypoint Following for Differentially Driven Wheeled Robots with Limited Velocity Perturbations

In this paper a unified motion control strategy dedicated for the waypoint following task realized by a differentially driven robot is presented. It is assumed that the vehicle moves with limited velocities and accelerations in order to reduce excessive slip and skid effects. In order to include operational constraints, a motion planner is combined with a universal stabilizer taking advantage of transverse functions. To improve tracking precision translated transverse functions are deployed and a new adaptive technique for the controller tuning is proposed. During the motion planning stage an auxiliary trajectory connecting points in the configuration space and satisfying assumed phase constraints is generated. The resulting motion execution system has been implemented on a laboratory-scale skid-steering mobile robot, which served as platform for experimental validation of presented algorithms.