Optimal Control Strategies for Wheeled Mobile Robot With Bounded Inputs

This paper presents a simple approach for solving optimal control problems in wheeled mobile robots with bounded inputs. The control objective is to minimize a quadratic index of performance subject to differential constraints (the mobile robot equations of motion). The solution to the problem is obtained by utilizing an explicit trajectory parametrization method, which allows us to establish a sub-optimal control strategy by minimizing a multivariable function subject to a set of algebraic constraints. The approach is based on the flatness property, which allows us to represent the flat output by a polynomial. The bounds on the input signals are taken into consideration in the current analysis.