Trajectory tracking for a mobile robot with skid-slip compensation in the vector-field-orientation control system

The article is devoted to a motion control problem for a differentially driven mobile robot in the task of trajectory tracking in the presence of skid-slip effects. The kinematic control concept presented in the paper is the Vector Field Orientation (VFO) feedback approach with a nonlinear feed-forward skid-slip influence compensation scheme. The VFO control law guarantees asymptotic convergence of the position tracking error to zero in spite of the disturbing influence of skid-slip phenomena. The paper includes a control law design description, stability and convergence analysis of a closed-loop system, and practical verification of the proposed control concept. The experimental results illustrate control quality obtained on a laboratory setup equipped with vision feedback, where the Kalman filter algorithm was used in order to practically estimate skid-slip components.