Safety-Critical Trajectory Tracking for Mobile Robots with Guaranteed Performance

Dear Editor, This letter considers a collision-free trajectory tracking problem for performance-guaranteed mobile robots (MRs) subject to obstacles. We propose a safety-critical performance-guaranteed trajectory tracking method based on control barrier functions (CBFs). First, an auxiliary system is established to generate the non-negative signals for inflexible bounds such that the performance constraints are not violated when avoiding obstacles. Next, the desired guidance laws are devised to evolve tracking errors within performance space by the error transformation technique. Then, a position-heading CBF based on a heading collision-free principle is developed. Under the CBF framework, the safety-critical angle speed guidance law is solved by a quadratic program with respect to position-heading CBF constraints. It is proved that all errors can converge and evolve within a prescribed performance space, and the closed-loop system is ensured to be safe. Finally, simulation and experiment results are given to verify the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed control scheme.