Finite-Time Pure Pursuit Guidance Control of a Four Mecanum Wheeled Mobile Robot With Active Disturbance Rejection

• Published in: IEEE Access
• Main Authors: Nayan Banik, Jawhar Ghommam, Mohammad H. Rahman
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2025-01-01
• Subjects: Mecanum wheeled mobile robot; prescribed-time control; cascaded extended state observer; pure pursuit guidance; trajectory tracking
• Online Access: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10908211/

This paper addresses the challenge of precise control and robust trajectory tracking for Four Mecanum Wheeled Mobile Robots (FMWMR) operating in environments where time-sensitive responses are critical and external conditions may vary. Traditional control approaches often fall short due to slow convergence rates and limited resilience to disturbances. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel control framework that integrates Prescribed-Time (PT) control, Cascaded Extended State Observers (CESO), and Pure Pursuit Guidance (PPG). The PT control component ensures that the system converges to the desired state within a user-defined prescribed time, regardless of initial conditions or disturbances, while CESO enhances disturbance estimation through a multi-layered observer structure, ensuring rapid and reliable adaptation under varying conditions. PPG is incorporated to improve trajectory tracking by guiding the robot toward a designated lookahead point, aligning the robot’s velocity with the target’s direction to enable smooth and computationally efficient path following that leverages FMWMR’s omnidirectional capabilities. We provide theoretical guarantees of stability and convergence, demonstrating that the proposed control architecture outperforms traditional finite-time and ESO-based control methods in terms of tracking accuracy, disturbance rejection, and adherence to temporal constraints. Numerical simulations validate the effectiveness and robustness of the framework, highlighting its potential for real-time applications in environments that demand high precision and adaptability.