Force Feedback Event Triggering-Based Tracking Control for Wheeled Mobile Robots

In soft deformable terrain environments, the robot slips due to dynamic changes in wheel-ground contact, which poses a great challenge to the design of the driving torque of its motion control system. To solve the trajectory tracking control problem of wheeled mobile robots in soft deformation terrain, an event triggering mechanism based on wheel-ground mechanical parameters was designed, in which wheel-terrain mechanics has an important influence on the driving torque and is included in the control system design process. Aiming at the wheeled mobile robot in the working environment of soft ground, considering the rolling resistance of the wheel during its driving process, a dynamic model based on wheel-ground interaction is established. Estimation of unmodelled dynamic and rolling resistance terms for wheeled mobile robots in soft deformable terrain environments by adaptive neural networks. Based on the static event triggering strategy based on constant threshold, a hybrid threshold dynamic event triggering strategy based on rolling resistance is proposed. By proving that there is a positive lower bound on the inter-event time, which means that Zeno behavior is avoided. Meanwhile, the lower bound of inter-event time will change with the designed dynamic threshold. Finally, the good control performance of the proposed algorithm under different ground environments is verified by simulation. Note to Practitioners—With the advancement of detection tasks, the working environment of wheeled mobile robots has become increasingly complex. In the motion control of a wheeled mobile robot in a soft deformable terrain working environment, the influence of the robot ’s wheel-to-ground contact is crucial to the successful realization of the task. The existing wheeled mobile robot control methods for soft deformable terrain working environment usually ignores the influence between wheels and ground, which cannot meet the application requirements of this complex scene. Aiming at the problem of tracking control of wheeled mobile robots in soft deformable terrain working environment, this paper, the traction force change caused by wheel-ground contact mechanics is taken as the main factor of event-triggered mechanism, and the force feedback event-triggered tracking control method is designed. Theoretical algorithms and simulation results show that a trade-off between robot tracking performance and communication resources in different ground environments is realized.