Finite-time obstacle avoidance for unicycle-like robot subject to additive input disturbances

The problem of avoiding obstacles while navigating within an environment for a Unicycle-like wheeled mobile robot is of prime importance in robotics; the aim of this work is to solve such a problem proposing a perturbed version of the standard kinematic model able to compensate for the neglected dynamics of the robot. The disturbances are considered additive on the inputs and the solution is based on the supervisory control framework, finite-time stability and a robust multi-output regulation. The effectiveness of the solution is proved, supported by experiments and finally compared with the dynamic window approach to show how the proposed method can perform better than standard methods.