Design and implementation of an adaptive sliding mode controller for stabilizing nonholonomnic wheeled mobile robot

In this paper we address the problem of stabilizing nonholonomic wheeled mobile robots (WMR) at an equilibrium point in the configuration space in presence of possibly modeling and non-modeling uncertainties. For general class of nonholonomic wheeled mobile robots, we demonstrate how adaptive controller's concepts can be combined with the robust methods for solving the problem of global convergence of stabilizing error. These methods are used by incorporating input augmentation in order to account for the underactuated property, without using control inputs of large magnitude. The global stability result is obtained in the Lyapunov sense. The simulation results are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of controller scheme. Real-time experimental results are also presented to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed controller for the stabilization of a real WMR.