Trajectory Tracking by Terminal Sliding Mode Control for a Three-Wheeled Mobile Robot

In this paper, the issue of trajectory tracking for a non-holonomic three-wheeled mobile robot is researched and a controller with two layers' structure which separately deals with the kinematic and dynamic characteristics of the mobile robot system is constructed. For the kinematics, a conventional and common kinematic controller is chosen to transform the position tracking errors into command velocity which will be taken as the reference input into the proposed dynamic controller. For the dynamics, a terminal sliding mode control strategy is designed to track the command velocity generated by the kinematic controller. The stability of the proposed control scheme has been proved by Lyapunov theory. Practical experiments are carried out to verify the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed control algorithm.