Trajectory tracking control for mobile robots with adaptive gain

This paper studies the trajectory tracking problem and the controller gain adjustment problem for Wheeled Mobile Robots. The controller gain has a great influence on the robot’s trajectory tracking: it can influence both the tracking accuracy and the tracking speed. Therefore, it is very important to choose a suitable control gain during the controller design process. Current neural network gain controllers have a complex structure and require a lot of calculations to find the optimal value. To solve this problem, we design a trajectory tracking controller with a simple structure with adaptive gain by combining the controller with a neural network. The input to this controller is the robot’s attitude error. The controller has no hidden layer and directly outputs the trajectory tracking control law. Firstly, the kinematic controller is designed based on Lyapunov function method to ensure that the robot moves according to the reference trajectory. Then, the online gain adjustment algorithm is designed by using neural network to realize the fast adjustment of the controller gain and ensure the reliability of the controller. Finally, the backstepping method is utilized to design the velocity tracking controller based on the error between the virtual velocity and the actual velocity. Considering the influence of the external environment, we also design a nonlinear disturbance observer to estimate the total disturbance on the robot. We perform simulation experiment in MATLAB. The result of the experiment shows that the control algorithm proposed in this paper can realize the accurate tracking of the robot on the specified trajectory. The gain adjustment algorithm we designed can find the optimal gain value quickly and efficiently, thus improving the stability and efficiency of the controller. The method can be applied to most mobile robot trajectory tracking problems and solves the problem of control gain adjustment.