Single and multiple motion control of autonomous robotic vehicles

The past few decades have witnessed a significant research effort in the area of motion control for autonomous robotic vehicles. This paper presents a brief survey related to two topics in this area: i) the design of control systems to drive a vehicle to track a time-parameterized trajectory (trajectory tracking), or to follow a geometric path (path-following); and ii) the problem of making a group of autonomous robotic vehicles follow desired geometric paths while keeping a specified formation pattern (cooperative path-following). From a theoretical standpoint, special attention is given to a number of challenging problems that include the complex and nonlinear vehicle dynamics, uncertainty, disturbances, and when in cooperation, the problem of communication constraints. Illustrative examples using Lyapunov based techniques for motion control design will be presented for wheeled mobile robots, autonomous underwater vehicles, and unmanned aerial vehicles.