Design of Unified Controller for Obstacle Avoidance and Tracking of Wheeled Mobile Robots

The novel unified control approach is proposed to simultaneously solve tracking and obstacle avoidance problem of the wheeled mobile robot (WMR). Applying the Lyapunov's direct method, a stable unified controller is designed to simultaneously handle tracking and obstacle avoidance for this WMR system based on the potential function. By the Lyapunov stability theory, it is proved that tracking errors of the closed-loop system are asymptotical convergence, the tracking errors converge to the zero outside the obstacle detection region and the obstacle avoidance is guaranteed inside the obstacle detection region. The effectiveness and robustness of the proposed control method are validated from the simulation results.