A universal adaptive controller for tracking and stabilization control of nonholonomic vehicles

We propose a general class of adaptive controllers for leader-follower simultaneous tracking and stabilization of force-controlled nonholonomic mobile robots, under the hypothesis that the leader velocities are either integrable (parking problem), or persistently exciting (tracking problem). For the first time in the literature, we establish uniform global asymptotic stability for the origin of the closed-loop system (in the kinemtacis state space). We also show that the kinematics controller renders the system robust to perturbations in the sense of integral-to state stability. Then, we show that for the case in which the force dynamics equations are also considered (full model), any velocity-tracking controller with the property that the error velocities are square integrable may be used to ensure global tracking or stabilization. This modularity and robustness of our controller, added to the strength of our stability statements, renders direct the extension of our main results to the difficult scenario of control under para-metric uncertainty