Adaptive feedback linearizing control of nonholonomic wheeled mobile robots in presence of parametric and nonparametric uncertainties

In this paper, the integrated kinematic and dynamic trajectory tracking control problem of wheeled mobile robots (WMRs) is addressed. An adaptive robust tracking controller for WMRs is proposed to cope with both parametric and nonparametric uncertainties in the robot model. At first, an adaptive nonlinear control law is designed based on input–output feedback linearization technique to get asymptotically exact cancellation of the parametric uncertainty in the WMR parameters. The designed adaptive feedback linearizing controller is modified by two methods to increase the robustness of the controller: (1) a leakage modification is applied to modify the integral action of the adaptation law and (2) the second modification is an adaptive robust controller, which is included to the linear control law in the outer loop of the adaptive feedback linearizing controller. The adaptive robust controller is designed such that it estimates the unknown constants of an upper bounding function of the uncertainty due to friction, disturbances and unmodeled dynamics. Finally, the proposed controller is developed for a type (2, 0) WMR and simulations are carried out to illustrate the robustness and tracking performance of the controller.