Robust control of a wheeled mobile robot by voltage control strategy

A nonholonomic wheeled mobile robot is an uncertain nonlinear system. To guarantee stability and overcome uncertainties, the torque-based control approaches become computationally extensive. To simplify the control problem, this paper develops a novel robust control approach based on the voltage control strategy. To improve the precision, the dynamics of motors are taken into account. In addition, a novel state-space model for the electrically driven nonholonomic wheeled mobile robot in the workspace is presented. The most important advantage of the proposed control law is that it is free from the robot dynamics, thereby the controller is simple, fast response, and robust with ignorable tracking error. The control approach is verified by stability analysis. Simulations and experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed control applied to a nonholonomic wheeled mobile robot driven by permanent magnet DC motors. A comparison with an adaptive feedback linearizing control approach and the PID control confirms the superiority of the proposed approach in terms of precision, simplicity of design, and computations.