Sliding Mode Control of Spot Bead Welding Mobile Robot

In shipbuilding industry, it is needed to make uniform welding beads on the floor of ship. In this paper, a sliding mode controller is applied to a two-wheeled spot bead welding mobile robot (SWMR) to track a straight line and make spot bead of welding. The mobile robot, is considered in terms of dynamic model with known parameters in the presence of disturbances. To obtain the controller, two sliding surfaces of velocity tracking error and posture error are chosen, and the controller is extracted from the sliding condition to stabilize the sliding surface. The control system uses a camera sensor for measuring the errors. Also, the welding experiments are carried out to verify the proposed controller.