Adaptive Trajectory Tracking Control for Nonholonomic Wheeled Mobile Robots:A Barrier Function Sliding Mode Approach

The trajectory tracking control performance of nonholonomic wheeled mobile robots(NWMRs)is subject to nonholonomic constraints,system uncertainties,and external disturbances.This paper proposes a barrier function-based adaptive sliding mode control(BFASMC)method to provide high-precision,fast-response performance and robustness for NWMRs.Compared with the conventional adaptive sliding mode control,the proposed control strategy can guarantee that the sliding mode variables converge to a predefined neighborhood of origin with a predefined reaching time independent of the prior knowledge of the uncertainties and disturbances bounds.Another advantage of the proposed algorithm is that the control gains can be adaptively adjusted to follow the disturbances amplitudes thanks to the barrier function.The benefit is that the overestimation of control gain can be eliminated,resulting in chattering reduction.Moreover,a modified barrier function-like control gain is employed to prevent the input saturation problem due to the physical limit of the actuator.The stability analysis and comparative experiments demonstrate that the proposed BFASMC can ensure the prespecified convergence performance of the NWMR system output variables and strong robustness against uncertainties/disturbances.

Heuristic Expanding Disconnected Graph:A Rapid Path Planning Method for Mobile Robots

Existing mobile robots mostly use graph search algorithms for path planning,which suffer from relatively low planning efficiency owing to high redundancy and large computational complexity.Due to the limitations of the neighborhood search strategy,the robots could hardly obtain the most optimal global path.A global path planning algorithm,denoted as EDG*,is proposed by expanding nodes using a well-designed expanding disconnected graph operator(EDG)in this paper.Firstly,all obstacles are marked and their corners are located through the map pre-processing.Then,the EDG operator is designed to find points in non-obstruction areas to complete the rapid expansion of disconnected nodes.Finally,the EDG*heuristic iterative algorithm is proposed.It selects the candidate node through a specific valuation function and realizes the node expansion while avoiding collision with a minimum offset.Path planning experiments were conducted in a typical indoor environment and on the public dataset CSM.The result shows that the proposed EDG*reduced the planning time by more than 90%and total length of paths reduced by more than 4.6%.Compared to A*,Dijkstra and JPS,EDG*does not show an exponential explosion effect in map size.The EDG*showed better performance in terms of path smoothness,and collision avoidance.This shows that the EDG*algorithm proposed in this paper can improve the efficiency of path planning and enhance path quality.

A Practical Study of Intelligent Image-Based Mobile Robot for Tracking Colored Objects

Object tracking is one of the major tasks for mobile robots in many real-world applications.Also,artificial intelligence and automatic control techniques play an important role in enhancing the performance of mobile robot navigation.In contrast to previous simulation studies,this paper presents a new intelligent mobile robot for accomplishing multi-tasks by tracking red-green-blue(RGB)colored objects in a real experimental field.Moreover,a practical smart controller is developed based on adaptive fuzzy logic and custom proportional-integral-derivative(PID)schemes to achieve accurate tracking results,considering robot command delay and tolerance errors.The design of developed controllers implies some motion rules to mimic the knowledge of experienced operators.Twelve scenarios of three colored object combinations have been successfully tested and evaluated by using the developed controlled image-based robot tracker.Classical PID control failed to handle some tracking scenarios in this study.The proposed adaptive fuzzy PID control achieved the best accurate results with the minimum average final error of 13.8 cm to reach the colored targets,while our designed custom PID control is efficient in saving both average time and traveling distance of 6.6 s and 14.3 cm,respectively.These promising results demonstrate the feasibility of applying our developed image-based robotic system in a colored object-tracking environment to reduce human workloads.

A finite-time fuzzy adaptive output-feedback fault-tolerant control for underactuated wheeled mobile robots systems

This paper investigates the adaptive fuzzy finite-time output-feedback fault-tolerant control (FTC) problemfor a class of nonlinear underactuated wheeled mobile robots (UWMRs) system with intermittent actuatorfaults. The UWMR system includes unknown nonlinear dynamics and immeasurable states. Fuzzy logic systems(FLSs) are utilized to work out immeasurable functions. Furthermore, with the support of the backsteppingcontrol technique and adaptive fuzzy state observer, a fuzzy adaptive finite-time output-feedback FTC scheme isdeveloped under the intermittent actuator faults. It is testifying the scheme can ensure the controlled nonlinearUWMRs is stable and the estimation errors are convergent. Finally, the comparison results and simulationvalidate the effectiveness of the proposed fuzzy adaptive finite-time FTC approach.

Design of intelligent controller for mobile robot based on fuzzy logic

In order to improve a mobile robot＇s autonomy in unknown environments, a novel intelligent controller is designed. The proposed controller is based on fuzzy logic with the aim of assisting a multi-sensor equipped mobile robot to safely navigate in an indoor environment. First, the designs of two behaviors for a robot＇s autonomous navigation are described, including path tracking and obstacle avoidance, which emulate human driving behaviors and reduce the complexity of the robot＇s navigation problems in unknown environments. Secondly, the two behaviors are combined by using a finite state machine （FSM）, which ensures that the robot can safely track a predefined path in an unknown indoor environment. The inputs to this controller are the readings from the sensors. The corresponding output is the desired direction of the robot. Finally, both the simulation and experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Stabilization of Dynamic Systems for Multiple Omni-Directional Mobile Robots

This paper deals with the stabilization of dynamic systems for two omni directional mobile robots by using the inner product of two vectors, one is from a robot's position to another's, the other is from a robot's target point to another's. The multi step control laws given can exponentially stabilize the dynamic system and make the distance between two robots be greater than or equal to the collision free safe distance. The application of it to two omni directional mobile robots is described. Simulation result shows that the proposed controller is effective.

Multi-sensor systems and information processing of mobile robot in uncertain environments

The PBJ- 01 robot is a kind of mobile robot featuring six wheels and two swing arms which can help it to fit many terrains. The robot has a sophisticated sensor system, which includes ultrasonic sensors, tentacle sensors and a vision sensor. The PBJ- 01 adopts behavior-based reactive control architecture in which the key part is an object recognition system based on a fuzzy neural network. Simulation validates that this system can conclude the obstacle type from the sensor data, and help the robot decide whether to negotiate or to avoid obstacles.

A review:On path planning strategies for navigation of mobile robot

This paper presents the rigorous study of mobile robot navigation techniques used so far.The step by step investigations of classical and reactive approaches are made here to understand the development of path planning strategies in various environmental conditions and to identify research gap.The classical approaches such as cell decomposition(CD),roadmap approach(RA),artificial potential field(APF);reactive approaches such as genetic algorithm(GA),fuzzy logic(FL),neural network(NN),firefly algorithm(FA),particle swarm optimization(PSO),ant colony optimization(ACO),bacterial foraging optimization(BFO),artificial bee colony(ABC),cuckoo search(CS),shuffled frog leaping algorithm(SFLA)and other miscellaneous algorithms(OMA)are considered for study.The navigation over static and dynamic condition is analyzed(for single and multiple robot systems)and it has been observed that the reactive approaches are more robust and perform well in all terrain when compared to classical approaches.It is also observed that the reactive approaches are used to improve the performance of the classical approaches as a hybrid algorithm.Hence,reactive approaches are more popular and widely used for path planning of mobile robot.The paper concludes with tabular data and charts comparing the frequency of individual navigational strategies which can be used for specific application in robotics.

Neural Network-Based Adaptive Motion Control for a Mobile Robot with Unknown Longitudinal Slipping

When the mobile robot performs certain motion tasks in complex environment, wheel slipping inevitably occurs due to the wet or icy road and other reasons, thus directly influences the motion control accuracy. To address unknown wheel longitudinal slipping problem for mobile robot, a RBF neural network approach based on whole model approximation is presented. The real-time data acquisition of inertial measure unit(IMU), encoders and other sensors is employed to get the mobile robot’s position and orientation in the movement, which is applied to compensate the unknown bounds of the longitudinal slipping using the adaptive technique. Both the simulation and experimental results prove that the control scheme possesses good practical performance and realize the motion control with unknown longitudinal slipping.

DEVELOPMENT AND MOTION ANALYSIS OF MINIATURE WHEEL-TRACK-LEGGED MOBILE ROBOT

A miniature wheel-track-legged mobile robot to carry out military and civilian missions in both indoor and outdoor environments is presented. Firstly, the mechanical design is discussed, which consists of four wheeled and four independently controlled tracked arms, embedded control system and teleoperation. Then the locomotion modes of the mobile robot and motion analysis are analyzed. The mobile robot can move using wheeled, tracked and legged modes, and it has the characteristics of posture-recovering, high mobility, small size and light weight. Finally, the effectiveness of the deve-loped mobile robot is confirmed by experiments such as posture recovering when tipped over, climb-ing stairs and traversing the high step.

Adaptive Trajectory Tracking Control for a Nonholonomic Mobile Robot

As one of the core issues of the mobile robot motion control, trajectory tracking has received extensive attention. At present, the solution of the problem only takes kinematic or dynamic model into account separately, so that the presented strategy is difficult to realize satisfactory tracking quality in practical application. Considering the unknown parameters of two models, this paper presents an adaptive controller for solving the trajectory tracking problem of a mobile robot. Firstly, an adaptive kinematic controller utilized to generate the command of velocity is designed based on Backstepping method. Then, in order to make the real velocity of mobile robot reach the desired velocity asymptotically, a dynamic adaptive controller is proposed adopting reference model and Lyapunov stability theory. Finally, through simulating typical trajectories including circular trajectory, fold line and parabola trajectory in normal and perturbed cases, the results illustrate that the control scheme can solve the tracking problem effectively. The proposed control law, which can tune the kinematic and dynamic model parameters online and overcome external disturbances, provides a novel method for improving trajectory tracking performance of the mobile robot.

Robust adaptive control for a nonholonomic mobile robot with unknown parameters

A robust adaptive controller for a nonholonomic mobile robot with unknown kinematic and dynamic parameters is proposed. A kinematic controller whose output is the input of the relevant dynamic controller is provided by using the concept of backstepping. An adaptive algorithm is developed in the kinematic controller to approximate the unknown kinematic parameters, and a simple single-layer neural network is used to express the highly nonlinear robot dynamics in terms of the known and unknown parameters. In order to attenuate the effects of the uncertainties and disturbances on tracking performance, a sliding mode control term is added to the dynamic controller. In the deterministic design of feedback controllers for the uncertain dynamic systems, upper bounds on the norm of the uncertainties are an important clue to guarantee the stability of the closed-loop system. However, sometimes these upper bounds may not be easily obtained because of the complexity of the structure of the uncertainties. Thereby, simple adaptation laws are proposed to approximate upper bounds on the norm of the uncertainties to address this problem. The stability of the proposed control system is shown through the Lyapunov method. Lastly, a design example for a mobile robot with two actuated wheels is provided and the feasibility of the controller is demonstrated by numerical simulations.

Ellipsoidal bounding set-membership identification approach for robust fault diagnosis with application to mobile robots

A robust fault diagnosis approach is developed by incorporating a set-membership identification (SMI) method. A class of systems with linear models in the form of fault related parameters is investigated, with model uncertainties and parameter variations taken into account explicitly and treated as bounded errors. An ellipsoid bounding set-membership identification algorithm is proposed to propagate bounded uncertainties rigorously and the guaranteed feasible set of faults parameters enveloping true parameter values is given. Faults arised from abrupt parameter variations can be detected and isolated on-line by consistency check between predicted and observed parameter sets obtained in the identification procedure. The proposed approach provides the improved robustness with its ability to distinguish real faults from model uncertainties, which comes with the inherent guaranteed robustness of the set-membership framework. Efforts are also made in this work to balance between conservativeness and computation complexity of the overall algorithm. Simulation results for the mobile robot with several slipping faults scenarios demonstrate the correctness of the proposed approach for faults detection and isolation (FDI).

Robust Tracking Control for Self-balancing Mobile Robots Using Disturbance Observer

In this paper,a robust tracking control scheme based on nonlinear disturbance observer is developed for the self-balancing mobile robot with external unknown disturbances.A desired velocity control law is firstly designed using the Lyapunov analysis method and the arctan function.To improve the tracking control performance,a nonlinear disturbance observer is developed to estimate the unknown disturbance of the self-balancing mobile robot.Using the output of the designed disturbance observer,the robust tracking control scheme is presented employing the sliding mode method for the selfbalancing mobile robot.Numerical simulation results further demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed robust tracking control scheme for the self-balancing mobile robot subject to external unknown disturbances.

Backstepping Based Global Exponential Stabilization of a Tracked Mobile Robot with Slipping Perturbation

While the nonholonomic robots with no-slipping constraints are studied extensively nowadays, the slipping effect is inevitable in many practical applications and should be considered necessarily to achieve autonomous navigation and control purposes especially in outdoor environments. In this paper the robust point stabilization problem of a tracked mobile robot is discussed in the presence of track slipping, which can be treated as model perturbation that violates the pure nonholonomic constraints. The kinematic model of the tracked vehicle is created, in which the slipping is assumed to be a time-varying pa- rameter under certain assumptions of track-soil interaction. By transforming the original system to the special chained form of nonholonomic system, the integrator backstepping procedure with a state-scaling technique is used to construct the controller to stabilize the system at the kinematic level. The global exponential stability of the final system can be guaranteed by Lyapunov theory. Simulation results with different initial states and slipping parameters demonstrate the fast convergence, robustness and insensitivity to the initial state of the proposed method.

Target Tracking Algorithm Using Finite-time Convergence Smooth Second-order Sliding Mode Controller for Mobile Robots

Target tracking control for wheeled mobile robot （WMR） need resolve the problems of kinematics model and tracking algorithm.High-order sliding mode control is a valid method used in the nonlinear tracking control system,which can eliminate the chattering of sliding mode control.Currently there lacks the research of robustness and uncertain factors for high-order sliding mode control.To address the fast convergence and robustness problems of tracking target,the tracking mathematical model of WMR and the target is derived.Based on the finite-time convergence theory and second order sliding mode method,a nonlinear tracking algorithm is designed which guarantees that WMR can catch the target in finite time.At the same time an observer is applied to substitute the uncertain acceleration of the target,then a smooth nonlinear tracking algorithm is proposed.Based on Lyapunov stability theory and finite-time convergence,a finite time convergent smooth second order sliding mode controller and a target tracking algorithm are designed by using second order sliding mode method.The simulation results verified that WMR can catch up the target quickly and reduce the control discontinuity of the velocity of WMR.

Vision-based Stabilization of Nonholonomic Mobile Robots by Integrating Sliding-mode Control and Adaptive Approach

Vision-based pose stabilization of nonholonomic mobile robots has received extensive attention. At present, most of the solutions of the problem do not take the robot dynamics into account in the controller design, so that these controllers are difficult to realize satisfactory control in practical application. Besides, many of the approaches suffer from the initial speed and torque jump which are not practical in the real world. Considering the kinematics and dynamics, a two-stage visual controller for solving the stabilization problem of a mobile robot is presented, applying the integration of adaptive control, sliding-mode control, and neural dynamics. In the first stage, an adaptive kinematic stabilization controller utilized to generate the command of velocity is developed based on Lyapunov theory. In the second stage, adopting the sliding-mode control approach, a dynamic controller with a variable speed function used to reduce the chattering is designed, which is utilized to generate the command of torque to make the actual velocity of the mobile robot asymptotically reach the desired velocity. Furthermore, to handle the speed and torque jump problems, the neural dynamics model is integrated into the above mentioned controllers. The stability of the proposed control system is analyzed by using Lyapunov theory. Finally, the simulation of the control law is implemented in perturbed case, and the results show that the control scheme can solve the stabilization problem effectively. The proposed control law can solve the speed and torque jump problems, overcome external disturbances, and provide a new solution for the vision-based stabilization of the mobile robot.

A Switching Controller System for a Wheeled Mobile Robot

A wheeled mobile mechanism with a passive and/or active linkage mechanism for rough terrain environment is developed and evaluated. The wheeled mobile mechanism which has high mobility in rough terrain needs sophisticated system to adapt various environments. We focus on the development of a switching controller system for wheeled mobile robots in rough terrain. This system consists of two sub-systems： an environment recognition system using link angles and an adaptive control system. In the environment recognition system, we introduce a Self-Organizing Map （SOM） for clustering link angles. In the adaptive controllers, we introduce neural networks to calculate the inverse model of the wheeled mobile robot. The environment recognition system can recognize the environment in which the robot travels, and the adjustable controllers are tuned by experimental results for each environment. The dual sub-system switching controller system is experimentally evaluated. The system recognizes its environment and adapts by switching the adjustable controllers. This system demonstrates superior performance to a well-tuned single PID controller.

Novel method to calibrate kinematic parameters for mobile robots

In order to reduce the system errors of dead reckoning and improve the localization accu- racy, a new model for systematic error of mobile robot was defined and a UMBmark-based method for calibrating and compensating systematic error was presented. Three dominant reasons causing systematic errors were considered： imprecise average wheel diameter, uncertainty about the effec- tive wheelbase and unequal wheel＇ s diameter. The new model for systematic errors is considering the coupling effect of the three factors during the localization of mobile robot. Three coefficients to calibrate average wheel diameter, effective wheelbase, left and right wheels＇ diameter were ob- tained. Then these three coefficients were used to make improvements on robot kinematic equations. The experiments on the dual-wheel drive mobile robot DaNI show that the presented method has achieveda significant improvement in the location accuracy compared with the UMBmark calibration.

ALGORITHM AND IMPLEMENTATION OF AUTO-SEARCHING WELD LINE FOR WELDING MOBILE ROBOT

An algorithm of auto-searching weld line for welding mobile robot is presented. Auto-searching weld line is that the robot can automatically recognize a weld groove according to the characteristics of the weld groove before welding, and then adjust itself posture to the desired status preparing for welding, namely, it is a process that the robot autonomously aligns itself to the center of welding seam. Firstly, the configuration of welding mobile robot with the function of auto-searching weld line is introduced, then the algorithm and implementation of auto-searching weld line are presented on the basis of kinematics model of the robot, at last trajectory planning among auto-searching weld line is investigated in detail. The experiment result shows that the developed welding mobile robot can successfully implement the task of auto-searching weld line before welding, tracking error precision can be controlled to approximate ±1.5 mm, and satisfy the requirement of practical welding project.