Design and implementation of a block‐backstepping based tracking control for nonholonomic wheeled mobile robot

This paper presents formulation of a novel block‐backstepping based control algorithm to overcome the challenges posed by the tracking and the stabilization problem for a differential drive wheeled mobile robot (WMR). At first, a two‐dimensional output vector for the WMR has been defined in such a manner that it would decouple the two control inputs and, thereby, allow the designer to formulate the control laws for the two inputs one at a time. Actually, the decoupling has been carried out in a way to convert the system into block‐strict feedback form. Thereafter, block‐backstepping control algorithm has been utilized to derive the expressions of the control inputs for the WMR system. The proposed block‐backstepping technique has further been enriched by incorporating an integral action for enhancing the steady state performance of the overall system. Global asymptotic stability of the overall system has been analyzed using Lyapunov stability criteria. Finally, the proposed control algorithm has been implemented on a laboratory scale differential drive WMR to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control law in real‐time environment. Indeed, the proposed design approach is novel in the sense that it has judiciously exploited the nonholonomic constraint of the WMR to result in a reduced order block‐backstepping controller for the WMR, and thereby, it has eventually yielded a compact expression of the control law that is amenable to real‐time implementation. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.