Tracking Control of Autonomous Mobile Robots Based on Coupled Sliding Mode Mechanism with Adaptive Switching Gain

Autonomous mobile robots (AMR) have been appealed for automation application and many other fields due to their commendable performance. But the precise trajectory tracking control in industrial scenarios is a difficult task in the presence of external disturbances and internal parameter perturbations. This paper presents a controller integrated by a coupled sliding mode control (CSMC) and an adaptive sliding mode control (ASMC) to cope with coupling and disturbance of the kinematic model, respectively. The kinematic model is established based on the state error vector of AMR. Then, by exploiting the coupled sliding surfaces, a CSMC for coupled kinematic system is formulated. Meanwhile, an ASMC which can tune the switching gain adaptively is proposed to achieve the trade-off between anti-disturbance and chattering-suppression. The convergence and stability of the AMR system are verified using Lyapunov stability theory. Finally, simulations on the AMR system are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.