Performing trajectory tracking control of an unmanned ground vehicle using fractional order terminal sliding mode controller

In this paper, fractional order terminal sliding mode control (FOTSMC) method is used for trajectory tracking control performance of an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV). Firstly, a kinematic controller is designed to estimate the linear and angular velocities of the vehicle. Then, a FOTSMC design is carried out to track the vehicle reference velocities. Terminal sliding mode control (TSMC) and sliding mode control (SMC) methods are also used to demonstrate the performance of the proposed controller. The simulation results show that the proposed controller improves the tracking error by about 13% over SMC and 6.146% compared to TSMC.