Sliding Mode Neuro Adaptive Control in Trajectory Tracking for Mobile Robots

In this work a neural indirect sliding mode control method for mobile robots is proposed. Due to the nonholonomic property and restricted mobility, the trajectory tracking of this system has been one of the research topics for the last ten years. The proposed control structure combines a feedback linearization model, based on a kinematics nominal model, and a practical design that combines an indirect neural adaptation technique with sliding mode control to compensate the dynamics of the robot. Using an online adaptation scheme, a neural sliding mode controller is used to approximate the equivalent control in the neighbourhood of the sliding manifold. A sliding control is appended to ensure that the neural sliding mode control can achieve a stable closed-loop system for the trajectory-tracking control of a mobile robot with unknown nonlinear dynamics. The proposed design simultaneously guarantees the stability of the adaptation of the neural nets and obtains suitable equivalent control when the parameters of the robot model are unknown in advance. The robust adaptive scheme is applied to a mobile robot and shown to be able to guarantee that the output tracking error will converge to zero.