Design and Implementation of an Adaptive Neuro-controller for Trajectory Tracking of Nonholonomic Wheeled Mobile Robots

A kinematic adaptive neuro-controller for trajectory tracking of nonholonomic mobile robots is proposed. The kinematic adaptive neuro-controller is a real-time, unsupervised neural network that learns to control a nonholonomic mobile robot in a nonstationary environment, which is termed Self-Organization Direction Mapping Network (SODMN), and combines associative learning and Vector Associative Map (VAM) learning to generate transformations between spatial and velocity coordinates. The transformations are learned in an unsupervised training phase, during which the robot moves as a result of randomly selected wheel velocities. The robot learns the relationship between these velocities and the resulting incremental movements. The neural network requires no knowledge of the geometry of the robot or of the quality, number, or configuration of the robot’s sensors. The efficacy of the proposed neural architecture is tested experimentally by a differentially driven mobile robot.