Pitching motion control of a wheeled mobile robot using sliding mode based extremum seeking

Abstract

This paper presents a control strategy for a wheeled mobile robot with variable pitch blades which make it highly mobile over irregular terrain. In our previous work, a mathematical model with respect to pitching motion of the robot necessary to climb a stair was developed, and a servo controller for the pitching motion was proposed under the assumption that the reference slip of the wheel to be followed was known in advance. In this paper, an extremum seeking method by applying sliding mode is employed to obtain the desirable reference slip. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed controller.