State of the Art in Predictive Control of Wheeled Mobile Robots

The paper is concerned with the problem of tracking control of wheeled mobile robots (WMRs) using predictive control systems. Various kinematic structures of WMRs important from the point of view of motion control are discussed. A hierarchical approach to the problem of motion control of this kind of robots is presented. The problems of trajectory tracking and path following control of WMRs are briefly discussed. The methods of predictive control of WMRs are described in detail and the following aspects relevant to predictive control are considered: kinematic structures of robots, slip of wheels and its compensation, assumed constraints, methods of optimization of the objective function, problems of model nonlinearity, linearization and discretization, stability of the control system and use of the state observers.