Trajectory Tracking Kinematic Control of Omnidirectional Mobile Robots via Active Disturbance Rejection Control with Anti-Peaking Mechanism

In this article, the problem of designing a practical active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) scheme for a class of differentially flat omnidirectional mobile robots is addressed. A custom version of ADRC is proposed that uses a special observer that allows the controller feedforward input to be designed with an anti-peaking functionality, which helps to decrease the peaking phenomenon in the observer response. To further increase the practical appeal of the proposed ADRC design, the control algorithm here is derived using only the robot kinematic model and assumes the robot position and orientation as the only available system information. Experimental results, including a comparison with the proposal without the mechanism and a classic controller are shown using a laboratory robot operating in an irregular terrain, verifying the effectiveness of the proposed governing scheme in terms of trajectory tracking and disturbance rejection.