Decoupled Fractional Super-Twisting Stabilization of Interconnected Mobile Robot Under Harsh Terrain Conditions

The four-wheel omnidirectional mobile robot usually suffers disturbed or unstable lateral motion under harsh terrain conditions (such as uneven or oiled ground). Generally for such a challenging situation, the lumped disturbances and interconnected states render available coupling solutions difficult to achieve demand-satisfied performance. This paper proposes a novel decoupled fractional super-twisting sliding mode control (FST-SMC) method by (i) constructing an inverse system-based decoupling to form a pseudolinear composition system; (ii) presenting an enhanced nominal sliding law for chattering mitigation and (iii) designing an unbiased multi-layer fuzzy estimator with gain-learning capacity to compensate for the lumped disturbances actively. Given that the identified disturbances can be directly reflected in the FST-SMC law, this method guarantees an accurate and robust control without causing gain overestimation. Theoretical analysis is offered to verify the asymptotic stability. Under harsh terrain conditions, experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed FST-SMC method.