Passivity-Based Switching Control for Stabilization of Wheeled Mobile Robots

We propose a novel switching control law for the posture stabilization of a wheeled mobile robot, that utilizes the (energetic) passivity of the system's open-loop dynamics with nonnegligible inertial effects. The proposed passivity-based switching control law ensures that the robot's (x, y)-position enters into an arbitrarily small (as specified by user-designed error-bound) level set of a certain navigation potential function defined on the (x, y)- plane, and that its orientation converges to a target angle. Under this passivity-based switching control, the robot moves back and forth between two submanifolds in such a way that the navigation potential is strictly decreasing during this inter-switching move. Once the system's (x, y)-trajectory enters such a desired level set, at most one more switching occurs to correct orientation. Simulation is performed to validate/highlight properties of the presented control law.