Observer-based finite-time control for trajectory tracking of wheeled mobile robots with kinematic disturbances

Wheeled Mobile Robots (WMRs) are systems with applications in diverse fields such as transportation, civilian services, military use, and space exploration. Then, their use will continue increasing, making WMRs an essential research topic that deserves further study. To this end, this work presents a novel observer-based finite-time controller for trajectory tracking control of WMRs disturbed by kinematic disturbances. In the proposed approach, the kinematic model of the WMR is transformed into a set of two decoupled second-order systems. Then, the proposed controller is divided into two parts. The first one employs an observer to estimate the effect of the kinematic disturbances. The second part consists of a finite-time controller designed to achieve finite-time convergence of the tracking error. A detailed synthesis procedure theoretically demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed controller. Subsequently, the proposed scheme is compared against finite-time, feedback, and H_∞ controllers. Exhaustive numerical simulations show that the proposed new control methodology achieves the trajectory tracking objective despite kinematic disturbances and outperforms the other control procedures. Finally, some comments and numerical results are given to clarify how the proposed control methodology can be used to design new controllers for trajectory tracking in WMRs and demonstrate that the new proposal remains to have a good performance when the system's coordinates are corrupted by measurement noise.