Sliding mode control of two-wheeled welding mobile robot for tracking smooth curved welding path

In this paper, a nonlinear controller based on sliding mode control is applied to a two-wheeled Welding Mobile Robot (WMR) to track a smooth curved welding path at a constant velocity of the welding point. The mobile robot is considered in terms of dynamics model in Cartesian coordinates under the presence of external disturbance, and its parameters are exactly known. It is assumed that the disturbance satisfies the matching condition with a known boundary. To obtain the controller, the tracking errors are defined, and the two sliding surfaces are chosen to guarantee that the errors converge to zero asymptotically. Two cases are to be considered : fixed torch and controllable torch. In addition, a simple way of measuring the errors is introduced using two potentiometers. The simulation and experiment on a two-wheeled welding mobile robot are provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed controller.