Computationally Efficient Tracking Control of Differential Drive Wheeled Mobile Robots

This paper presents a computationally efficient, heuristic-free, and nonlinear feedback control framework for the tracking control of the position and orientation of a differential drive wheeled mobile robot (WMR) subjected to high-speed maneuvers and external disturbances. We synthesize the control law by an extension of Gauss’s principle of least constraint with dynamic incorporation of holonomic and nonholonomic equality constraints and with coordinate transformation. The command control actions for the WMR’s constrained dynamics result from solving a linear matrix equation (a Karush-Kuhn-Tucker system) at each point in time. No dynamics linearization or iterative solution is involved in the framework. Numerical experiments of a high-speed, differential drive WMR under sinusoidal and Gaussian external disturbances are presented to showcase the effectiveness of the proposed method.