Robust Adaptive Control for Tunnel Inspection Robots with External Disturbances

In this paper, an adaptive disturbance rejection controller (A-DRC) is proposed for tunnel inspection robots equipped with a mobile platform, which system is modeled as a flexible system by partial differential equations (PDEs). First, the system dynamics are formulated as PDEs subject to boundary conditions. Furthermore, an A-DRC is proposed, which relies solely on boundary state feedback to suppress vibration while handling unknown system parameters and external disturbances. Then, the asymptotic stability of the closed-loop system is rigorously established via the Lyapunov method. Finally, compared with the existing control method, the proposed controller guarantees that the unknown parameters tension can be well estimated and vibrations can be well suppressed while eliminating the influence that external disturbance caused observed by the numerical simulation, verifying the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed scheme. Finally, physical experiments are carried out to confirm the method’s practical viability.