Decentralized continuous robust controller for mobile robots

A composite system model for the wheeled mobile robot is proposed. The overall system can be thought of as a composite of two subsystems; one is the vehicle with m degrees of freedom, and the other is the robot arm with n degrees of freedom. The interconnections between them are unknown interactive forces. To overcome the effects of the unknown interactive forces and some mismatches between the estimated parameter values and the actual ones, a decentralized continuous robust controller is proposed. Conditions are derived for stability when the interconnections are not known. The theoretical analysis and computer simulation results show that the performance of the continuous robust controller is much better than that of the nonrobust controller. An interesting conclusion is that one can choose arbitrarily large weighting gains to decrease the trajectory errors without increasing the magnitude of the physical control torques