SUPERVISORY FAULT ADAPTIVE CONTROL OF MOBILE ROBOT By

Approved: Date: ________________________________________________ ___________________ ________________________________________________ ___________________ ________________________________________________ ___________________ ii ii DEDICATION To my parents and my wife Jun iii iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I would like to express my gratitude to my advisor Dr. Nilanjan Sarkar. This research would not have been possible without his wonderful guidance and advice. He has been a constant source of inspiration, encouragement and assistant during all these years, both in my academic studies and more. I have benefited greatly by his unique perspective toward research. Moreover his openness and thoroughness in discussing and evaluating new ideas and research directions have always been a great resource of innovation. I would like to thank Prof. Kenneth D. Frampton for his generous support, with out which our experiment would have been impossible. I would also like to thank Prof. George E. Cook for his terrific courses that enlighten greenhorns with essential knowledge and ability in robotics. I would like to acknowledge constant support from my colleagues. I have always benefited from Mr. Zhen Zhang's solid math background, extensive literature collection, his endurance in hardware building, and our discussions. All the software works in PC /104 should go to Mr. Karthikeyan Nagarajan. More importantly, his plentiful knowledge and skill in software design have contributed to the system design. I owe everything I have ever achieved to my parents, Genlin Ji and Ru Meng. I will always be grateful to them for giving their unrelenting love and support. iv iv Finally I would like to thank Jun, my fabulously devoted and supportive wife for her courage and smile. Thank you for being here for me.