Lightweight design and precise tracking control for differential drive wheeled mobile robot

Abstract Differential‐drive wheeled mobile robot (DDWMR) offers excellent maneuverability, making it increasingly valuable to researchers in recent years, but the control poses major challenges due to the nonlinearity nature of the system. This study proposes an integrated scheme consisting of a backstepping controller and an adaptive sliding‐mode controller (ASMC) to address these challenges including the DDWMR being subject to external disturbances and uncertainties. The presented DDWMR design is lightweight, structurally robust, and mechanically simple with a total wight of about 10 kg. The new control scheme can achieve accurate trajectory tracking while ensuring dynamic stability of the DDWMR. Performance comparison of trajectory tracking was made on the approach with that of proportional‐integral‐derivative (PID) controller and sliding mode controller (SMC). Compared to a SMC + backstepping controller, simulation results revealed that performance improvements in trajectory tracking reached root‐mean‐square errors (RMSE) reduction by 3.7% in the X‐axis, and by 23.1% in the Y‐axis, respectively. Finally, experimental results verified that the proposed controller outperformed both traditional controllers by achieving a reduction of RMSE by 12.1% in the X‐axis and by 19.1% in the Y‐axis, respectively in comparison with the SMC + backstepping controller in a real‐world application.