Nonlinear Controllers for a Mobile Robot
by
Arun Deo
University of the South Pacific
Coauthors: Dr. Jito Vanualailai

The current intense interest in the development and adoption of strategies for automatic parking, docking as well as path tracking could be attributed to the growing use of wheeled mobility in numerous applications such as transportation vehicles, surveillance and ferrying mobile robots. In this talk, we look at a novel method of constructing automatic path tracking controllers, possibly nonlinear, for planar-wheeled mechanisms. Purely mathematical, the method, based on the Direct Method of Liapunov, is at the early stage of development, and thus, at present, is particularly suited for computer simulations, which will be presented in the meeting.

Date received: September 25, 2000