In the practical design of nonholonomic control systems, saturated input is an important issue to consider. A number of stabilizing controllers for chained forms with bounded inputs have been proposed by different researchers. Under some conditions, nonholonomic wheeled mobile robots (NWMR) can be transformed into chained forms by state and input transformations. In this paper, we propose semiglobal practical stabilizing control schemes for a class of NWMR with saturated inputs. These schemes are given not based on chained forms, but based on a kind of new systems which are converted from NWMR by using state transformations without any input transformation. The advantage for doing this is involved in two points: first, the stabilizers proposed are semiglobal. Second, for the methods exploited here, the original system inputs (in the sense of kinematics) can be guaranteed to stay within the desired upper bounds. Finally, the simulation is given. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.