Trajectory Tracking Control of Wheeled Mobile Robots with Skidding and Sliding Disturbances

Wheeled mobile robots (WMRs) often encounter challenges like skidding and sliding when performing tasks in complex environments. To address these issues, this paper studies how to achieve disturbance-rejection trajectory tracking for WMRs under skidding and sliding conditions. The kinematics and dynamics models of WMRs under skidding and sliding conditions are established. A kinematics adaptive controller using the backstepping method is designed to supply the desired linear and angular velocities for the dynamics controller. To conquer sliding and external disturbances, an improved linear extended state observer (LESO) for both linear and angular velocity controllers is designed to estimate the total disturbance and compensate for it. The control law is optimized using a modified fal (mfal) function to ensure that the robot’s actual speed can quickly and accurately track the desired speed, effectively reducing pose tracking errors. Finally, simulation studies confirmed the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed control method, demonstrating its reliability and efficiency in performing tasks in complex environments.