This PhD thesis deals with the kinematic modeling and control of wheeled mobile robots. 
In particular it focuses on the following issues:

- It is modeled a generic wheel that includes all the common types: fixed, centered orientable, 
off-centered orientable (castor) and swedish (also referred to as universal, Mecanum or Ilon).

- It is developed an efficient procedure, based on the null space concept, to obtain kinematic 
models. This procedure is applied to many mobile robots and the accuracy of the obtained models 
is characterized through an isotropy analysis.

- It is deduced a new geometric approach that establishes the singularity of any kinematic 
model of any wheeled mobile robot. This geometric approach is applied to all the mobile robots 
previously mentioned.

- It is proposed a kinematic modeling with slip obtained from successive approximations of 
the robot dynamic model and the characterization of the friction on the wheels.

- It is suggested a kinematic control scheme with three nested loops (dynamic, kinematic and 
planning) that is similar to the approaches used for robotic manipulators. It is studied in 
depth the kinematic loop and indirectly the planning loop, through the characterization of 
the references that each mobile robot can track with no error.

- An industrial forklift has been used to test the algorithms of kinematic modeling with slip 
and robot control.

- Finally two solutions have been developed for the robotic applications of parallel parking 
and line tracking with a vision system.