Experimental validation of integrated and robust control system for mobile robots

The need to design a robust, accurate and lightweight real-time control architecture for a low-cost embedded system has become a necessary step in robotics applications. Therefore, the goal of this work is to design an integrated and accurate control system for a differential wheeled mobile robot. A hierarchical control approach has been adopted in this work which, takes into account the sub-systems controller of the problem related to robot path tracking. To this end, the control structure includes the design of a sliding mode control (SMC) scheme to stabilize the robot and precisely track the path that matches the kinematics of the mechanical structure. Moreover, the control structure provides a new design of the DC motor controller for optimum performance. To obtain an integrated control system for automated tasks, an accurate position estimation and an optimized high-level path planning algorithm have been proposed. The robustness and performance of the approved control and estimation systems have been verified through real-time implementations in different experiments. The results show the high accuracy of the robot’s tracking on different paths.