Adaptive Fuzzy Path Tracking Control for Mobile Robots with Unknown Control Direction

In order to synthesize controllers for wheeled mobile robots (WMRs), some design techniques are usually based on the assumption that the center of mass is at the center of the robot itself. Nevertheless, the exact position of the center of mass is not easy to measure, thus WMRs is a typical uncertain nonlinear system with unknown control direction. Based on the fast terminal sliding mode control, an adaptive fuzzy path tracking control scheme is proposed for mobile robots with unknown control direction. In this scheme, the fuzzy system is used to approximate unknown functions, and a robust controller is constructed to compensate for the approximation error. The Nussbaum-type functions are integrated into the robust controller to estimate the unknown control direction. It is proved that all the signals in the closed-loop system are bounded, and the tracking error converges to a small neighborhood of the origin in a limited time. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is illustrated by a simulation example.