Cascade Sliding Control for Trajectory Tracking of a Nonholonomic Mobile Robot with Adaptive Neural Compensator

Abstract

A design of sliding mode controllers (SMC) with adaptive capacity is presented. This control technique is formed by two cascaded SMC controllers, one of them having an adaptive neural compensator (ANC); both are put on a WMR (wheeled mobile robot). The mobile robot is divided into a kinematics and a dynamics structure; the first SMC controller acts only on the kinematic structure and the SMC with neural adaptive compensator on the other one. The dynamic SMC was designed applying an inverse dynamic controller and using the model dynamics of the WMR. The adaptive neural compensation (ANC) was used in order to reduce the control error caused by the dynamics variations but it conveys a residual approximation error, so a sliding part was designed to cancel such error. This technique allows achieving the control objective despite parameter variations and external disturbances that take place in the dynamics; on the other hand, the ANC can adjust its neural parameters to reduce the dynamics variations of the WMR and thus improve the trajectory tracking control. Problems of convergence and stability are treated and design rules based on Lyapunov’s theorem are given.