An optimal control procedure is presented for steering of an unmanned cart which has two motored wheels on its left and right side. Steering, running and stopping are enabled by controlling the motor speed independently. An optimal proportional-plus-integral control is employed to eliminate steady state error which is sustained by a simple proportional control for tracking a circular arc path. A simple and readily-implemented suboptimal control is also examined. The suboptimal control gives comparable performance and therefore provides an effective approach for industrial application of the unmanned cart. Effects of design parameters of unmanned cart such as forward velocity, wheel radius and position of sensor are investigated. It is shown that within the practicable values of the parameters the controlled performance improves rapidly with increase of those parameters then the improvement becomes negligible, which suggests base values over which the parameters should be taken.