An online reference governor for mobile robot to reduce the occurrence of control input saturation

This study proposed an online reference governor for a mobile robot to reduce the occurrence of control input saturation. For following the trajectory by a mobile robot, it is one of the practical subjects to provide appropriate control reference even if any disturbances occur. We proposed a methodology to regulate the control reference iteratively based on time-scaling approach. The time-scaling approach is a method to realize to regulate time development characteristic on the given trajectory. It is difficult to model the effect of the interaction with the road surface and the trajectory tracking error is appeared as the amount of accumulated such factors. Therefore, it is a practical approach to reduce the occurrence of control input saturation based on the evaluation of the trajectory tracking error. Proposed reference governor realizes online time scaling based on the trajectory tracking error index and a smooth transition dynamics. By introducing the proposed method, the occurrence of control input saturation can be reduced in case of that the disturbances occur. For verification of our proposed method, computer simulations utilizing a stable velocity controller were conducted and the results were discussed.