Voltage control strategy for an uncertain mobile robot

Purpose – The uncertainty and nonlinearity are the challenging problems for the control of a nonholonomic wheeled mobile robot. To overcome these problems, many valuable methods have been proposed by using two control loops namely the kinematic control and the torque control so far. In majority of the proposed approaches the dynamics of actuators is omitted for simplicity in the control design. This drawback degrades the control performance in high-velocity tracking control. On the other hand, to guarantee stability and overcome uncertainties, the control methods become computationally extensive and may be impractical due to using all states. The purpose of this paper is to design a simple controller with guaranteed stability for overcoming the nonlinearity, uncertainty and actuator dynamics. Design/methodology/approach – The control design includes two control loops, the kinematic control loop and the novel dynamic control loop. The dynamic control loop uses the voltage control strategy instead of the torque control strategy. Feedbacks of the robot orientation, robot position, robot linear and angular velocity, and motor currents are given to the control system. Findings – To improve the precision, the dynamics of motors are taken into account. The most important advantages 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. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed control applied on an uncertain nonholonomic wheeled mobile robot driven by permanent magnet dc motors. A comparison with an adaptive sliding-mode dynamic control approach confirms the superiority of the proposed approach in terms of precision, simplicity of design and computations. Originality/value – The originality of the paper is to present a new control design for an uncertain nonholonomic wheeled mobile robot by using voltage control strategy in replace of the torque control strategy. In addition, a novel state-space model of electrically driven nonholonomic wheeled mobile robot in the workspace is presented.