Reactive target-tracking control with obstacle avoidance of unicycle-type mobile robots in a dynamic environment

Abstract

This paper proposes a new reactive control design for unicycle-type mobile robots with limited sensor range to track targets while avoiding static and moving obstacles in a dynamically evolving environment. With the relative motion among the mobile robot, targets, and obstacles formulated in polar coordinates, kinematic control laws achieving target-tracking and obstacle avoidance are synthesized using Lyapunov based technique, and more importantly, the proposed control laws also account for possible kinematic control saturation constraints. Simulation examples are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed control.