On Active Disturbance Rejection Control for Path Following of Automated Guided Vehicle with Uncertain Velocities

This paper studies the path following problem of the automated guided vehicle (AGV) with both uncertain linear velocity and angular velocity. An active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) based backstepping control method is proposed to deal with the effects caused by these two uncertainties. To handle the uncertain sinusoidal term of the virtual input in the dynamics of cross-track error, the tuning law of the feedback gain is analyzed. It is proven that the proposed tuning law ensures both the compensation for the uncertainty and the elimination of the saturation of virtual input. Furthermore, the transient performance of the path following is studied by the error between the actual trajectory and the ideal trajectory. It is proven that this error during the entire time region can be tuned small enough by designing the proposed ADRC controller's parameters. Finally, the simulations results under several typical uncertain velocities demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed ADRC method.