PATH PLANNING AND CONTROL OF A MOBILE BASE WITH NONHOLONOMIC CONSTRAINTS

Motion Planning and control of mobile vehicles with nonholonomic const raints are in their infancy. A systematic approach for modeling and ba se motion control of a mobile vehicle is presented. A nonlinear coordi nate transformation that takes into account the complete dynamics with nonholonomic constraints is used in order to obtain a linear system i n space coordinates. An input-output feedback linearization inner loop is subsequently designed to transform this system into a linear-point mass system in the coordinates corresponding to the control objective s. A rigorous yet simple approach to motion planning through optimizat ion techniques is presented for these mobile vehicles. The resulting C artesian trajectory generated from the motion planning algorithm is em ployed as the reference trajectory in the outer loop, which is designe d based on a Lyapunov function candidate. The net result is a base mot ion controller that gives capabilities to these mobile vehicles not on ly for tracking a Cartesian trajectory but also to achieve a desired f inal orientation (docking angle).