Sliding mode tracking control of nonholonomic wheeled mobile robots

This paper proposes a sliding mode control method for wheeled mobile robots. Due to the nonholonomic property and restricted mobility, the trajectory tracking of this system has been one of the challenging class of control problems. A new sliding mode control method is presented as a sliding mode controller by representing the kinematic equation of a mobile robot as two-dimensional polar coordinates. The proposed method, compared with previous studies based on a polar coordinate representation, can effectively improve the trajectory tracking performance and reduce the constraints on the posture of the robot. The stability and performance analyses are performed and also simulations are included to demonstrate the practical application of our scheme.