Attitude and Direction Control of the Unicycle Robot Using Fuzzy-Sliding Mode Control

Abstract

This paper proposes an attitude and direction control of a single wheel balanced robot. A unicycle robot is controlled by two independent control laws: the mobile inverted pendulum control method for pitch axis and the reaction wheel pendulum control method for roll axis. It is assumed that both roll dynamics and pitch dynamics are decoupled. Therefore the roll and pitch dynamics are obtained independently considering the interaction as disturbances to each other. Each control law is implemented by a controller separately. The unicycle robot has two DC motors to drive the disk for roll and to drive the wheel for pitch. Since there is no force to change the yaw direction, the present paper proposes a method for changing the yaw direction. The angle data are obtained by a fusion of a gyro sensor and an accelerometer. Experimental results show the performance of the controller and verify the effectiveness of the proposed control algorithm.