Modeling and Adaptive Fault Compensation for Two Physically Linked 2WD Mobile Robots

Abstract

This article addresses the fault-tolerant control problem of two-wheel-drive (2WD) mobile robots under actuator faults. To improve the actuation redundancy, a physical link is employed to connect two 2WD mobile robots. The kinematics and dynamics of such a two-robot system are modeled. An adaptive fault-tolerant control scheme is developed to make the two-robot system asymptotic track a desired reference. To deal with the uncertainty of the control gain matrix caused by actuator faults, a new positive definite control gain matrix is constructed, and its minimum eigenvalue is utilized for the adaptive compensation design. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed fault-tolerant control scheme.