Local Exponential Regulation of Nonholonomic Systems in Approximate Chained Form with Applications to Off-Axle Tractor-Trailers

Most of drift-less nonholonomic systems cannot be exactly converted to an nonholonomic chained form, a wealth of design tools developed for the control of nonholonomic chained form are thus not directly applicable to such systems. Nevertheless, there exists a class of systems that may be locally approximated by the nonholonomic chained form around certain equilibrium points. In this work, we propose a discontinuous and a smooth time-varying control laws respectively for the approximated nonholonomic chained form, guaranteeing local exponential convergence of state to the desired equilibrium point. An tractor towing off-axle trailers is taken as an example to illustrate the approaches

Integral sliding mode control of an extended Heisenberg system

International audienceThis paper deals with the practical robust stabilization and tracking problems of the perturbed multidimensional Heisenberg system with some additional integrators in the control input path. This objective is achieved by the use of variable structure control laws with an integral augmented sliding variable. This note shows how to select the integral sliding surface in such a way that the practical stabilization of the extended Heisenberg system is achieved in spite of the uncertainties and without loss of controllability. Experimental results on a wheeled mobile robot show the performance of the proposed controller for the practical stabilization and tracking problems