  Interest in designing, manufacturing, and using autonomous robots has been
rapidly growing during the most recent decade. The main motivation for this
interest is the wide range of potential applications these autonomous systems
can serve in. The applications include, but are not limited to, area coverage,
patrolling missions, perimeter surveillance, search and rescue missions, and
situational awareness. In this thesis, the area of control and state estimation
in non-holonomic mobile robots is tackled. Herein, optimization based solutions
for control and state estimation are designed, analyzed, and implemented to
such systems. One of the main motivations for considering such solutions is
their ability of handling constrained and nonlinear systems such as
non-holonomic mobile robots. Moreover, the recent developments in dynamic
optimization algorithms as well as in computer processing facilitated the
real-time implementation of such optimization based methods in embedded
computer systems.
