Finite-Time Control Based on Differential Flatness for Wheeled Mobile Robots with Experimental Validation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a differential flatness-based control strategy combined with an innovative sliding mode control for wheeled mobile robots, validated through real-world experiments under disturbances to enhance tracking robustness.

Contribution

It presents a novel control approach integrating differential flatness and INH-SMC, with experimental validation demonstrating improved disturbance rejection in WMRs.

Findings

Effective disturbance rejection demonstrated in real-world tests.

The control strategy maintains accurate path tracking under various disturbances.

Experimental results confirm the method's robustness and practicality.

Abstract

A robust tracking control strategy is designed to empower wheeled mobile robots (WMRs) to track predetermined routes while operating in diverse fields and encountering disturbances like strong winds or uneven path conditions, which affect tracking performance. Ensuring the applicability of this tracking method in real-world scenarios is essential. To accomplish this, the WMR model is initially transformed into a linear canonical form by leveraging the differential flatness of its kinematic model, facilitating controller design. Subsequently, a novel integral nonlinear hyperplane-based sliding mode control (INH-SMC) technique is proposed for WMR under disturbances. The stability of the technique is analyzed and verified. Finally, its practical viability is demonstrated through a comparative real-world indoor experiment on a TurtleBot3 WMR subjected to disturbances, confirming the feasibility and efficacy of the proposed approach.