Trajectory tracking control of nonholonomic wheeled mobile robots using only measurements for position and velocity

This paper studies the trajectory tracking control of nonholonomic wheeled mobile robots, and only measurements for Cartesian position and velocity are used. A full-order observer is proposed to estimate the unmeasurable attitude and filter the position signal. Its effectiveness relies on the persistent excitation (PE) condition of non-zero linear velocity. Using the observer states, we design a local tracking controller that guarantees: (a) the linear velocity input is positive, and (b) the position tracking error is convergent to zero locally asymptotically. Experiments performed on a robot built in-house illustrate the control algorithm.