Madan Mohan Rayguru1 Rajesh Elara Mohan1 Rizuwana Parween1 Lim Yi1 Anh Vu Le2 Spandan Roy3
1 University of Technology and Design, Singapore 2 Ton Duc Thang University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam 3 IIIT Hyderabad, India
—Mobile robots play a crucial role in cleaning, maintenance, and surveillance applications. This article advocates for the use of a novel robust output feedback based path following controller, for a class of selfreconfigurable mobile robot under actuator saturation. The reconfigurability property of such platforms is captured via an uncertain Euler–Lagrange dynamics. The proposed control framework estimates the unmeasurable states and the uncertain dynamics terms through two extended high gain observers, whereas the actuator limits are honored via a fast dynamic compensator. The closed-loop stability is analyzed via contraction theory, which, compared to the conventional Lyapunov based approaches, avoids the requirement of arbitrarily large controller and observer gains. Such a feature is of particular interest in view of actuator saturation. The experimental results with PANTHERA self-reconfigurable robot validate the effectiveness of the proposed technique over the state of the art.