Robust tracking control of a unicycle-type wheeled mobile manipulator using a hybrid sliding mode fuzzy neural network

This article presents a robust tracking controller for an uncertain mobile manipulator system. A rigid robotic arm is mounted on a wheeled mobile platform whose motion is subject to nonholonomic constraints. The sliding mode control (SMC) method is associated with the fuzzy neural network (FNN) to constitute a robust control scheme to cope with three types of system uncertainties; namely, external disturbances, modelling errors, and strong couplings in between the mobile platform and the onboard arm subsystems. All parameter adjustment rules for the proposed controller are derived from the Lyapunov theory such that the tracking error dynamics and the FNN weighting updates are ensured to be stable with uniform ultimate boundedness (UUB).