Adaptive Fuzzy Control of Wheeled Mobile Robots With Prescribed Trajectory Tracking Performance

The problem of fast accurate trajectory tracking for the underactuated wheeled mobile robots (WMRs) with unknown dynamics and external disturbances is investigated in this paper. A novel adaptive fuzzy prescribed performance control strategy is proposed to deal with the problem. Instead of the approach angle or the azimuth angle, a pair of heading and orientation-related auxiliary variables are adopted to deal with the underactuation of the WMR. In place of the transverse function, the barrier function is combined with the adaptive fuzzy logic system to cope with the unknown WMR dynamics as well as environmental disturbances. Moreover, the barrier function is used to confine the position error rather than the tracking errors. By doing so, a continuous singularity-free high-performance control scheme is derived, which ensures that the WMR tracks the reference trajectory with the predefined speed and accuracy. Finally, a couple of comparative simulation studies are carried out to illustrate the above theoretical findings.