Adaptive Backstepping Control for a Unicycle-Type Mobile Robot

Abstract

This paper considers the trajectory tracking of a unicycle-type mobile robot. The nonlinear dynamics of the mobile robot is treated as two subsystems for the robot’s orientation and position. A Lyapunov-based adaptive control law is proposed for asymptotic tracking of the robot’s orientation, while an adaptive backstepping control scheme is proposed for asymptotic tracking of the robot’s position. The synthesized controllers and derived tuning laws were shown to drive the error dynamics to zero; hence, trajectory tracking was achieved. Simulations were conducted to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.