The design of time-optimal control for two-wheel driven carts catching a target trajectory (Q1301125)

The paper considers the minimum time control of position change of a mobile robot. The dynamics of the considered robot is defined by a third order autonomous ordinary differential equation with two-dimensional control function. The time-optimal problem of robot control position is solved with the use of the Pontryagin maximum principle. It has been shown that the minimum time control is of bang-bang type and generates the time-optimal control process with at most three switching operations. Additionally, the paper shows a practical algorithm that enables to find in a numerical way the times at which the switching operations should be executed.