Robust adaptive tracking control for uncertain nonholonomic mobile manipulator

In the research put forth, a robust adaptive control method for a nonholonomic mobile manipulator robot, with unknown inertia parameters and disturbances, was proposed. First, the description of the robot’s dynamics model was developed. Thereafter, a novel adaptive sliding mode control was designed, to which all parameters describing involved uncertainties and disturbances were estimated by the adaptive update technique. The proposed control ensures a relatively good system tracking, with all errors converging to zero. Unlike conventional sliding mode controls, the suggested is able to achieve superb performance, without resulting in any chattering problems, along with an extremely fast system trajectories convergence time to equilibrium. The aforementioned characteristics were attainable upon using an innovative reaching law based on potential functions. Furthermore, the Lyapunov approach was used to design the control law and to conduct a global stability analysis. Finally, experimental results and comparative study collected via a 05-DoF mobile manipulator robot, to track a given trajectory, showing the superior efficiency of the proposed control law.