An Anti-sideslip Path Tracking Control Method of Wheeled Mobile Robots

Anti-sideslip has not been paid much attention by most researchers of wheeled mobile robots. And some existing anti-sideslip path tracking control methods based on switching control have problems such as relying on design experience. To enable the wheeled mobile robot to prevent sideslip and track the reference path at the same time, we propose an anti-sideslip path tracking control method based on a time-varying local model. The principle of this method is to make model predictions and rolling optimizations in the robot coordinate system in each control period. The proposed controller is tested by MATLAB simulation. According to the simulation results, the proposed controller can prevent sideslip when the wheeled mobile robot tracks the reference path. Even if the ground adhesion coefficient is low, the maximum lateral speed of the robot is only 0.2159 m/s. While preventing sideslip, the proposed controller is able to keep the displacement error of path tracking within 0.1681 m. Under the same conditions, the maximum absolute value of the displacement error of the proposed controller is at least 55.15% smaller than that of the controller based on the global model.