Modeling and μ-synthesis Based Robust Trajectory Tracking Control of a Wheeled Mobile Robot

Performance of trajectory tracking is important for Wheeled Mobile Robots (WMR), which have wide applications in industry, medical treatment, and domestic service, etc. In this paper, comprehensive modeling of a WMR is presented with model parameters estimated via system identification. The influence on experimental frequency response due to friction disturbances at low frequency and modeling uncertainties at high frequency are carefully analyzed. To achieve higher trajectory-tracking performance, both the non-holonomic kinematic constraints and the dynamics of actual WMRs are taken into account, and a -synthesis based robust control method is presented to deal with the friction disturbances and the high-frequency modeling errors. Comparative experimental results are also obtained to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy in actual implementation.