Robust adaptive neural network control for environmental boundary tracking by mobile robots

The paper addresses the problem of environmental boundary tracking for the nonholonomic mobile robot with uncertain dynamics and external disturbances. To do environmental boundary tracking, a reference velocity is designed for the nonholonomic mobile robot. In this paper, a radial basis function neural network (NN) is used to approximate a nonlinear function containing the uncertain model terms and the elements of the Hessian matrix of the environmental concentration function. Then, the NN approximator is combined with a robust control to construct a robust adaptive NN control for the mobile robot to track the desired environment boundary. It is proved that the tracking error can be guaranteed to converge to zero in the ultimate. Simulation results are presented to illustrate the stability of the robust adaptive control. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.