Wheeled mobile robot design with robustness properties

Abstract

A trajectory tracking design for wheeled mobile robots is presented in this article. The design objective is to develop one nonlinear robust control law for the trajectory tracking problem of wheeled mobile robots in the presence of modeling uncertainties. The main contribution of this investigation is as follows. Under the effects of modeling uncertainties, an effective control design which can quickly converge tracking errors between the controlled wheeled mobile robot and the desired trajectory is derived mathematically. Generally, it is difficult to develop a nonlinear robust control design for the trajectory tracking problem of wheeled mobile robots due to the complexity and nonlinearity of the wheeled mobile robots’ dynamics. Fortunately, based on a series analysis for the tracking error dynamics of the controlled wheeled mobile robot, one promising solution is obtained. For verifying the trajectory tracking performance of this proposed method, two scenarios are utilized in the simulations and the practical tests.