Control and Model-Aided Inertial Navigation of a Nonholonomic Vehicle

International audienceThe present work deals with the control and localization problem of wheeled-mobile robots with nonholonomic constraints. In the proposed method a simple nonlinear control law, composed of a position and heading direction controller, is designed to asymptotically stabilize the position error. The control law takes into account the constraints on the control signals in order to avoid saturation of the actuators. Furthermore, this paper considers a method of using the dynamic vehicle model and vehicle's nonholonomic constraints in order to aid position and attitude estimates provided by an Inertial Navigation System (INS). It is shown that dynamic model and vehicle's nonholonomic constraints can reduce the error growth in robot position estimates. Simulations are included to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed scheme