LAUSR

Recently, the mobile wheeled inverted pendulum (MWIP) has gained an increasing interest in the field of robotics due to traffic and environmental protection problems. However, the MWIP system is characterized by its nonlinearity, underactuation, time-varying parameters, and natural instability, which make its modeling and control challenging. Traditionally, sliding mode control is a typical method for such systems, but it has the main shortcoming of a “chattering” phenomenon. To solve this problem, a super-twisting algorithm (STA)-based controller is proposed for the self-balancing and velocity tracking control of the MWIP system. Since the STA is essentially a second-order sliding mode control, it not only contains the merits of sliding mode control (SMC) in dealing with the uncertainties and disturbances but can also be effective in chattering elimination. Based on the STA, we develop an adaptive gain that helps to learn the upper bound of the disturbance by applying an adaptive law, called an adaptive super-twisting control algorithm (ASTA). The stability of the closed-loop system is ensured according to the Lyapunov theorem. Both nominal experiments and experiments with uncertainties are conducted to verify the superior performance of the proposed method.