Hybrid trajectory tracking control of wheeled mobile robots using predictive kinematic control and dynamic robust control

Trajectory tracking control of wheeled mobile robots (WMRs) is still a remarkable problem for many applications. In the present paper, a hybrid control is presented based on dynamic and kinematic equations of motion for wheeled mobile robots in the presence of the sum of the external disturbances and parametric uncertainty. The designed control for the WMR utilizes control and guidance to reach the reference path. In many studies, a control strategy is normally employed for WMR. However, in this study, hybrid control was used for the mentioned purpose. Akin to other studies, the kinematic control scheme here was based on the predictive control, and the dynamic control scheme was designed based on the robust control. Therefore, in this article, having introduced the kinematic model, a nonlinear predictive control was proved and designed. In the next step, a finite-time integral type terminal sliding mode control (FITSMC) was designed based on the nonlinear dynamic model in order to automatically adjust the control gain and eliminate online disturbances and destructive chattering phenomena completely. In particular, a finite-time disturbance observer was designed to estimate the external disturbances. The proof of the new proposed control scheme was presented using Lyapunov stability theory and numerical results. The mentioned integrated scheme, including predictive control (outer loop) and nonlinear adaptive control (inner loop), ensures the convergence and optimal tracking performance of all signals, as a result of which the tracking errors can arbitrarily converge to the origin in a finite time. In the final step, the simulation results were presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme using MATLAB software, and the introduced control design was compared with a similar controller quantitatively and qualitatively.