Neuro-adaptive dynamic control for mobile robots: Experimental validation

Abstract

This paper reports on the design and implementation of a neuro-adaptive controlled nonholonomic mobile robot. It presents experimental results to validate the employed control scheme on a physical setup for the first time, after it was originally proposed by the same authors and tested by simulations only. The control system is composed of a trajectory tracking kinematic controller which generates the reference wheel velocities, and a cascaded dynamic controller which employs a neural network for the real-time estimation of the robot's nonlinear dynamics so as to attain precise velocity tracking, even in the presence of unknown and/or time-varying dynamics. Details about the hardware and software setup, as well as salient implementation issues are also reported in this work.