Optimal enhanced backstepping method for trajectory tracking control of the wheeled mobile robot

Abstract This paper proposes a novel control method applied to the trajectory tracking of the wheeled mobile robot. This method can solve the tracking difficulty caused by the non‐holonomic constraint and the under‐actuated properties. First, according to the kinematic and dynamic tracking error models, the desired velocities for trajectory tracking purposes are obtained. Second, the control method, consisting of an enhanced backstepping controller with fewer gains and an optimization algorithm, is designed. The actual trajectory of the mobile robot is exactly converged and kept at the predefined reference trajectory by the operation of this method. Next, this method with globally uniformly asymptotically stability is theoretically analyzed. Finally, simulation comparisons and physical experiments are conducted in different scenarios. The tracking performance is evaluated by three metrics, namely convergence speed, tracking accuracy and robustness, thus verifying the effectiveness of the novel control method.