Tracking control of a two-wheeled mobile robot using input-output linearization

This paper discusses the tracking control of two-wheeled mobile robots that have more outputs than inputs. If the number of inputs and the number of outputs are not the same, the inverse of the decoupling matrix in the input-output linearization does not exist. Therefore, a modified input-output linearization method is proposed, to solve the problem by means of a generalized inverse that provides a least-squares solution. The experimental results show that the tracking of posture, position and orientation (the 3-output case) has advantages over position tracking (the 2-output case) from the viewpoint of input power efficiency, because smoother responses can be obtained by considering the orientation. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.