Time-invariant stabilization of a unicycle-type mobile robot: Theory and experiments

In this paper we develop two time-invariant control laws for a unicycle-type mobile robot. A mobile robot of this type is an example of a system with a nonholonomic constraint. Similarly to the majority of results in the literature thus far, the controllers are based on the robot's kinematic model. They do not directly address realistic factors such as motor dynamics, quantization, sensor noise or delay which may affect the robot stability and performance. We use a Khepera robot to compare the performance of these controllers in a realistic situation that includes all the previous factors.