Robust Control of Wheeled Mobile Robot Moving on Rough Surface

When wheeled mobile robots run fast on the rough surface, the devices loaded on the body are affected by the body acceleration and may be destroyed. In this paper, we propose a method to reduce the body acceleration of wheeled mobile robots. In this mobile robot, a ball screw is adopted as a mechanism to drive wheels up and down. To achieve small body acceleration, an ideal model is designed based on the state space description containing body acceleration. The information from accelerometers mounted on each wheel axis is used in the ideal model. Next, a robust model tracking controller is proposed. It is shown by carrying out experiments that the control performance is maintained even if the body weight is changed.