Adaptive tracking and regulation of a wheeled mobile robot with controller/update law modularity

A new adaptive controller is developed for wheeled mobile robots with parametric uncertainty in the dynamic model. The main theoretical contribution is the modular manner in which the control law and parameter update law are designed. This feature allows for design flexibility in the selection of the update law, and can be exploited to improve the transient response of the adaptive controller. The proposed controller also has the important feature of being applicable to both the tracking and regulation problems. The modularity of the adaptive controller is experimentally demonstrated on a K2A Cybermotion mobile robot that has been modified to allow for the implementation of torque-level control inputs. In particular, the adaptive controller with a gradient update law is evaluated vis-a-vis a least-squares update law.