Trajectory Tacking Controller Design for Wheeled Robots in Multi-robot Cooperative Transport

The multi-robot cooperative transport is subject to non-holonomic constraints and load rigid constraints, which put forward high requirements on the dynamic characteristics and steady-state error of its trajectory tracking controller. Based on Lyapunov’s second method, an asymptotic stable trajectory tracking controller for a wheeled mobile robot is designed, which realizes that the control input saturation constraint can slide along the boundary of the generalized velocity space and improves the response speed of the trajectory tracking controller within the robot’s generalized velocity space. The tracking error law of different target trajectories is studied, and a state machine with a threshold angle as the boundary is proposed to control the response sequence of the robot to the target parameters and reduce the error of the tracking process. Based on the fuzzy controller, the dynamic adjustment of the coefficient items of the trajectory tracking controller is realized, which effectively reduces the tracking steady-state error for different target speeds. The correctness and effectiveness of the controller are verified by multi-robot cooperative transport experiments. © 2024 Chinese Mechanical Engineering Society. All rights reserved.