Further Results on Safety-Critical Stabilization of Force-Controlled Nonholonomic Mobile Robots

Abstract In this article, we address the stabilization problem for force-controlled nonholonomic mobile robots under safety-critical constraints. We propose a continuous, time-invariant control law based on the γm-quadratic programming (γm-QP) framework, which unifies control Lyapunov functions (CLFs) and control barrier functions (CBFs) to enforce both stability and safety in the closed-loop system. For the first time, we construct a global, time-invariant, strict Lyapunov function for the closed-loop nonholonomic mobile robot full-dynamic system with a nominal stabilization controller in polar coordinates; this strict Lyapunov function then serves as the CLF in the QP design. Next, by exploiting the inherent cascaded structure of the vehicle dynamics, we develop a CBF for the mobile robot via an integrator backstepping procedure. Our main results guarantee both asymptotic stability and safety for the closed-loop system. Both the simulation and experimental results are presented to illustrate the effectiveness and performance of our approach.