Simultaneous Tracking and Stabilization of a Wheeled Inverted Pendulum: a Backstepping Sliding-Mode Approach

This paper presents a new simultaneous tracking and stabilization method by backstepping and sliding-mode control techniques for wheeled inverted pendulums. The proposed method is used to synthesize a unified controller in both kinematic and dynamic levels. In the kinematic level, virtual motion commands are designed to accomplish out simultaneous tracking and stabilization, while, in the dynamic level, two sliding-mode controllers are independently designed such that the robot can be steered to follow desired time-varying trajectories or go from one pose to another. Simulation results are conducted to show the effectiveness and performance of the proposed unified control method.