Synchronization Control with Adaptive Friction Compensation of Treadmill-Based Testing Apparatus for Wheeled Planetary Rover

This article studies synchronization control of a novel devised treadmill-based testing apparatus for wheeled planetary rover roaming at low speed. To offer satisfactory tracking performance and to ameliorate internal conflicts amongst individual treadmills during rover-treadmill interaction, a decentralized synchronization control strategy integrating an adaptive friction compensation scheme is proposed. To overcome the nonlinear friction effect at low-velocity scenarios, the LuGre model based friction compensation scheme is constructed with a dual-observer structure that can handle parametric uncertainties without recourse to the high-resolution encoder-required parameter identification. With the proposed control design, asymptotic stability of the closed-loop system is guaranteed with the tracking error and synchronization error converging to zero in presence of parametric uncertainties. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy, which significantly improves the tracking performance in comparison with the existing proportional differential (PD)-type controller and synchronization controller without friction compensation.