Adaptive robust control of Mecanum-wheeled mobile robot with uncertainties

This paper presents a novel implementation of an adaptive robust second-order sliding mode control (ARSSMC) on a mobile robot with four Mecanum wheels. Each wheel of the mobile robot is actuated by separate motors. It is the first time that higher-order sliding mode control method is implemented for the trajectory tracking control of Mecanum-wheeled mobile robot. Kinematic and dynamic modeling of the robot is done to derive an equation of motion in the presence of friction, external force disturbance, and uncertainties. In order to make the system robust, second-order sliding mode control law is derived. Further, adaptive laws are defined for adaptive estimation of switching gains. To check the tracking performance of the proposed controller, simulations are performed and comparisons of the obtained results are made with adaptive robust sliding mode control (ARSMC) and PID controller. In addition, a new and low-cost experimental approach is proposed to implement the proposed control law on a real robot. Experimental results prove that without compromising on the dynamics of the robot real-time implementation is possible in less computational time. The simulation and experimental results obtained confirms the superiority of ARSSMC over ARSMC and PID controller in terms of integral square error (ISE), integral absolute error (IAE), and integral time-weighted absolute error (ITAE), control energy and total variance (TV).