Path Following for Unicycle Robots With an Arbitrary Path Curvature

Abstract

A new feedback control model is provided that allows a wheeled vehicle to follow a prescribed path. Differently from all other methods in the literature, the method that is proposed neither requires the computation of a projection of the robot position on the path, nor does it need to consider a moving virtual target to be tracked. Nevertheless, it guarantees asymptotic convergence to a generic 2-D curve which can be represented through its implicit equation in the form <i xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">f</i> ( <i xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">x</i> , <i xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">y</i> )=0, and it puts no bounds on the initial position of the vehicle, provided that ∇ <i xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">f</i> ≠ 0 .