Application of a discontinuous controller with chattering attenuation to unicycle mobile robots

We developed a discontinuous controller to stabilize the movement of a unicycle mobile robot around a desired trajectory via backstepping methodology. The main contribution of the paper is that chattering signal, produced by the imprecision of the discontinuous terms, vanished thanks to an adaptive gain that reduces the chattering level once the position errors were zero. A stability analysis of the closed-loop dynamic system in question was performed within the framework of Lyapunov functions. Performance issues related to the discontinuous controllers are illustrated in numerical simulations applied to a unicycle mobile robot.