Constraint-following servo control for an underactuated mobile robot under hard constraints

This article formulates the control problem of underactuated mobile robot as servo constraint-following, and develops a novel constraint-following servo control approach for underactuated mobile robot under both servo soft and hard constraints. Servo soft constraints are expressed as equalities, which may be holonomic or non-holonomic. Servo hard constraints are expressed as inequalities. It is required that the underactuated mobile robot motion eventually converges to servo soft constraints, and satisfies servo hard constraints at all times. Diffeomorphism is employed to incorporate hard constraints into soft constraints, yielding new soft constraints to relax hard constraints. By this, we design a constraint-following servo control based on the new servo soft constraints, which drives the system to strictly follow the original servo soft and hard constraints. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is proved by rigorous proof and simulations.