An adaptive control strategy for indoor leader-following of wheeled mobile robot

Abstract In this paper, an adaptive control strategy is proposed for indoor leader-following of wheeled mobile robot (WMR), which involves trajectory reconstruction and controller design. The trajectory reconstruction aims to reconstruct the trajectory of the leading robot online based on the measurements of on-board sensors. To ensure following the leader with an allowable distance, reference trajectory is determined based on the reconstructed trajectory for the follower robot without explicitly planning any trajectory. Using such a real time constructed reference trajectory, a single controller is designed to simultaneously solve both the tracking and stabilization of the follower robot. The design parameters in the proposed control scheme are all independent of the actual reference trajectory which is the trajectory of the leading robot. This is important to solve the problem when such a reference trajectory is not available in advance. Furthermore, the unknown parameters and the bounds of external disturbances are all estimated and compensated such that global asymptotic stability is achieved. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy for the indoor leader-following of WMR.