Abstract

The control of nonholonomic systems is extremely challenging and stimulates researchers to design controllers for these highly nonlinear and complex systems. The control of these systems is important for the reason that they have numerous engineering applications such as mobile robots, space manipulators, multi-fingered robot, etc. The control techniques proposed for the nonholonomic systems can be divided into two types. The first is the kinematic control, which provides solution only at the pure kinematic level which yields driving speeds. The second is dynamic control, which takes inertia and forces into account and yields physical controls such as driving torques. But both of the above said schemes do not consider the actuator dynamics, which is an inherent part of the complete system and can affect the performance of the control system. In this thesis a strategy for designing a position tracking controller for a class of mechanical systems with nonholonomic velocity constraint is presented. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)