Fault tolerant control of differential drive mobile robots using sliding mode controller

Abstract

An actuator fault tolerant controller for differential drive mobile robots is proposed using the sliding surface scheme for a loss of effectiveness (LOE) actuator fault. It is shown that an LOE actuator fault can be modeled as a matched input disturbance and hence the sliding mode controller due its inherent robustness property can perfectly cancel the actuator fault effect on the performance of the mobile robot without a need to a fault detection and isolation module. Experimental validation is conducted on Qbot-2 mobile robot to verify the efficiency of the proposed controller scheme.