Trajectory tracking control for a wheel mobile robot on rough and uneven ground

Abstract

This paper investigates a dual closed-loop trajectory tracking control strategy for a non-holonomic wheeled mobile robot (WMR) with unknown external disturbances caused by rough and uneven ground. Firstly, a novel dynamic model without coupling is established by introducing a direct current motor model with uncertain parameters. Then a linear extended state observer (LESO) is presented to estimate unknown external disturbance of the WMR. And a dynamic controller based on sliding mode control method is provided in an inner loop to ensure exponential convergence of velocity error while compensating for observational error of the LESO. Considering that the robot's center of mass and geometric center do not overlap, a kinematic controller is designed in an outer loop to make positional error asymptotically stabilized. Finally, experiments are given to verify performance of tracking and disturbance rejection of the WMR.