Abstract
Mobile robots play a crucial role in cleaning, maintenance, and surveillance applications. This article advocates for the use of a novel robust output feedback based path following controller, for a class of self-reconfigurable mobile robot under actuator saturation. The reconfigurability property of such platforms is captured via an uncertain Euler-Lagrange dynamics. The proposed control framework estimates the unmeasurable states and the uncertain dynamics terms through two extended high gain observers, whereas the actuator limits are honored via a fast dynamic compensator. The closed-loop stability is analyzed via contraction theory, which, compared to the conventional Lyapunov based approaches, avoids the requirement of arbitrarily large controller and observer gains. Such a feature is of particular interest in view of actuator saturation. The experimental results with PANTHERA self-reconfigurable robot validate the effectiveness of the proposed technique over the state of the art.