Adaptive Fault-Tolerant PID Tracking Control of Mobile Robots Operating Over Sliding Surface

Most existing control algorithms for mobile robots are rather complicated yet seldom considering ground sliding nor actuation failures. This paper presents an adaptive tracking control algorithm for mobile robots operating over the slip-ping/skidding surface and at the same fine possibly suffering from actuator faults. The proposed control bears the simple structure of proportion-integrals-differential (PID) in which the PID gains are adaptively self-tuned, completely avoiding time-consuming manual “trial and error” tuning process as usually involved in most traditional PID control methods. The salient features of the proposed control lie in not only its simplicity in design and implementation, but also its ability to cope with modeling uncertainties and actuation faults as well as the sliding impacts. Simulations on butterfly trajectory tracking demonstrate and confirm the superior performance of the developed adaptive PID control as compared with traditional one.