Development of a Control Strategy for Accurate Path Tracking of Intelligent Vehicles

This paper reports on development of a sub-optimal control strategy for path tracking control of automated guided vehicles (AGV’s) and wheeled mobile robots. A two degree of freedom (DOF) nonlinear dynamic model is developed to represent their plane motion. Path tracking of the AGV is attained by controlling the position and orientation errors about the trajectory, which is accomplished by controlling the steering input signal on the basis of error feedbacks to the controller. Experimental results demonstrating the performance of the controlled system are reported.