Path Following for Unicycle Robots With an Arbitrary Path Curvature

A new feedback control model is provided that allows a wheeled vehicle to follow a prescribed path. Differently from all other methods in the literature, the method that is proposed neither requires the computation of a projection of the robot position on the path, nor does it need to consider a moving virtual target to be tracked. Nevertheless, it guarantees asymptotic convergence to a generic 2-D curve which can be represented through its implicit equation in the form
f
(
x
,
y
)=0, and it puts no bounds on the initial position of the vehicle, provided that ∇
f
≠ 0 .