A recursive technique for tracking control of nonholonomic systems in chained form

The authors address the tracking problem for a class of nonholonomic chained form control systems. A recursive technique is proposed which appears to be an extension of the currently popular integrator backstepping idea to the tracking of nonholonomic control systems. Conditions are given under which the problems of semiglobal tracking and global path-following are solved for a nonholonomic system in chained form and its dynamic extension. Results on local exponential tracking are also obtained. Two physical examples of an articulated vehicle and a knife edge are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm through simulations.