Design and Implementation of Terminal Sliding Mode Controller for Tracking a Wheeled Mobile Robot

In this paper, a trajectory tracking control of a nonholonomic wheeled mobile robot is proposed based on terminal sliding mode control, and the proposed method has been implemented on a wheeled mobile robot. A wheeled mobile robot is a nonlinear nonholonomic system, and it has three extended coordinates and a nonholonomic constraint. First, the equation of wheeled mobile robot for the extended chained form is derived by transformation of the nonholonomic system equation to the extended chained form. Then a finite time terminal sliding mode approach for trajectory tracking control of the wheeled mobile robot is presented. Afterward, with a graphical simulation environment which is applicable in the Matlab software, graphical simulations of wheeled mobile robot’s movement are done. The result of the graphical simulation in comparing with sliding mode control show the performance of the proposed method. Finally, the practical results of implementation of the controller for trajectory tracking of the wheeled mobile robot is shown, and the results show good tracking performance of the proposed method.