Tracking control is a very important and practical problem in the motion control of mobile robots. Tracking control can be divided into trajectory tracking control and path tracking control. In trajectory tracking control, the motion path of a mobile robot is given as a function of time, and in path tracking control, it is given by easily realizable geometrical parameters such as arcs. Trajectory tracking control is necessary when a robot should be in a certain position at a certain time. Path tracking control is appropriate when a robot has to move along the path given by the geometrical parameters at a constant speed.
Several control methods have been proposed to realize trajectory tracking control of mobile robots. In the previous literature, there has been a lot of research on the methods for achieving trajectory tracking control of robots by improving the speed control performance of individual actuators of mobile robots, but there is no report on improving the trajectory tracking performance of differential-driven mobile robots by compensating the errors of actuators.
Kim Yong Il, a section head at the Faculty of Mechanical Science and Technology, has proposed a method of designing a cross-coupled controller to improve the trajectory tracking performance by compensating the errors of actuators.
He implemented the PID control of individual motors and the cross-coupling control for error compensation to reduce trajectory tracking errors.
To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, he carried out a simulation by MATLAB/Simulink. The experimental results showed that the trajectory tracking error could be significantly reduced by the proposed method.
You can find the details in his paper “Trajectory Tracking Control of a Differential-Driven Mobile Robot using a Cross-Coupled Controller” in “Proceedings of KUTIC-2025”.