Finite‐Time Switched Second‐Order Sliding‐Mode Control of Nonholonomic Wheeled Mobile Robot Systems

A continuous finite‐time robust control method for the trajectory tracking control of a nonholonomic wheeled mobile robot (NWMR) is presented in this paper. The proposed approach is composed of conventional sliding‐mode control (SMC) in the internal loop and modified switched second‐order sliding‐mode (S‐SOSM) control in the external loop. Sliding‐mode controller is equivalently represented as stabilization of the nominal system without uncertainties. An S‐SOSM control algorithm is employed to counteract the impact of state‐dependent unmodeled dynamics and time‐varying external disturbances, and the unexpected chattering has been attenuated significantly. Particularly, state‐space partitioning is constructed to obtain the bounds of uncertainty terms and accomplish different control objectives under different requirements. Simulation and experiment results are used to demonstrate the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed approach.