Journal of the Brazilian Society of Mechanical Sciences and Engineering (2020) 42:561

https://doi.org/10.1007/s40430-020-02645-3

TECHNICAL PAPER

Sliding mode control of a line following robot

Huseyin Yildiz1 · Nuray Korkmaz Can2 · Omur Can Ozguney2 · Nurkan Yagiz2

Received: 17 June 2020 / Accepted: 25 September 2020

© The Brazilian Society of Mechanical Sciences and Engineering 2020

Abstract
Line following robots have ability to track a given path autonomously using feedback mechanisms. The path is usually a
black line on a white surface or a white line on a black surface. Today, line following robots are used in medical, industrial
and automotive industries. Therefore, the studies on the line following robots have been increased recently. In this study, a
robust, non-chattering sliding mode control (SMC) is designed and applied for a line following robot. The mobile robot is
designed to sense the straight or curved path with its infrared sensors mounted on the robot. Therefore, these infrared sensors
provide continuous streaming of the defined path to guide or direct changes in robot by activating motors on right wheel or/
and left wheel. The control strategy is curial to track complex paths accurately and to have a fast, stable and accurate line
following robot. Thus, for comparison, conventional proportional-integral-derivative (PID) is also applied to robot. The
main purpose of this study is to investigate performance of sliding mode control during path tracking. For this, numerical
solution and experimental study were carried out. From the results, it was understood that sliding mode controller is highly
efficient in tracking the path.

Keywords Line following robot · Sliding mode control · PID control · Experimental study

1 Introduction health care management system for decreasing the cost of

Line following robots have been used frequently in medical,
educational, industrial and entertainment fields in recent
years. Punetha et al. [1] designed a line following robot-
based health care management system. Their line following
robot carried medicines to the patients via following the
line drawn on the floor whenever they pressed the switch.
Their aim is to develop a safe, efficient and patient-centred
Technical Editor: Adriano Almeida Gonçalves Siqueira.
* Omur Can Ozguney
omur.ozguney@istanbul.edu.tr
Huseyin Yildiz
huseyin.yildiz@istanbul.edu.tr
Nuray Korkmaz Can
nkorkmaz@istanbul.edu.tr
Nurkan Yagiz
nurkany@istanbul.edu.tr
1
Department of Mechanical and Metal Technologies, Istanbul
University, Cerrahpasa, Istanbul 34500, Turkey
2
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Istanbul University,
Cerrahpasa, Istanbul 34320, Turkey
health care and providing continuous monitoring of the
patients. Illias et al. [2] constructed a mobile robot which
follows the nurse, carry load and medical equipment during
daily routines of nurses. Since hospital nurses bring instru-
ments, medicines or meals using cart, this can be tiresome
for nurses. Thus, their research focused on development of
hardware and sensor integration for nurse following robot. It
was found that the proposed robot was suitable for hospital
daily usage. Since robotics is very popular in education at
all levels recently Makrodimitris et al. [3] developed an
interactive game for children over seven years with a semi-
autonomous color line following mobile robots. Hence,
the children can learn new technologies and its applica-
tions with efficient and entertaining methods. The results
of their study shown that the developed game with color
line was very reliable and the robot cost was reasonable
as well. Other application of the line following robots is
automated equipment carriers in industrial facilities. Kai-
ser et al. [4] designed an autonomous robot that manages
the products from the production stage to the storage pro-
cess. The developed robot has the task of defining a path
for blind people working in the office. By adding a hand
and object detector to the robot, it is aimed to reach places

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that cannot be reached by human hands. They tried to detect
moving objects using a motion sensor. One of the popular
applications of line follower robots is autonomous vehi-
cles. Febtriko and Yulianti [5] suggested a bus transporta-
tion system for Pekanbaru with a line follower robot as a
trans-metro simulation bus which works with photodiode
sensors and ultrasonic sensors. Therefore, the robot stops
automatically at every stop or place and is monitored with
the global positioning system (GPS). Line following robots
are also very popular to use in shopping malls, museums,
etc. for navigating people certain locations with minimum
effort. One of the applications of the line follower robot is
store and retrieve systems. Ali and Rashid [6] performed
simulations for object store systems with circular path and
modified circular path. N-ary tree and digital algorithm
were used to reduce the rabble occurs on the line follower
system during movement. Simulation results were shown
that there was significant progress in the length of the path
and arrival time.
Controllers are commonly used to get a better tracking
performance on robots. Oktarina et al. [7] designed a line
follower robot for throwing away trash in the shopping
centres. They used PID controller to adjust the movement
of the robot. They found that P value is effective to move
more stable. Pakdaman and Sanaatiyan [8] designed line
follower robot for a competition. They used eight infra-
red sensors on the robot to track the curve and cycle path
accurately. Yet, they didn’t apply any control strategies for
their model. The robot direction was changed by driver due
to receive data from sensors. Roy and Noel [9] presented
three different control strategies (neural network, learning
vector quantization and reinforcement learning) for line
following robot to follow tight curves at high speeds. The
developed robot shows high performance in reducing vibra-
tions during motion. Also, low energy consumption and
low cost are its advantages. They designed a benchmark
path to compare the effectiveness of pure adaptive neural
network and proposed hybrid control. When the results are
examined, the role of the developed hybrid controller in
vibration reduction can be clearly seen. Engin and Engin
[10] designed a line follower wheeled mobile robot with
PID controller algorithm. They proposed PID controller
to increase the navigation accuracy of the line follower
mobile robot. They were suggested from the experimental
results that, the proposed control strategy can successfully
track the straight line and circular path, sharp-turn line and
S-shape line tracking. Elayaraja and Ramabalan [11] have
studied on a fuzzy logic controller and regression method
to find optimum design parameters for a line following
robot with minimum path completion time. Zai and Song
[12] were proposed an adaptive sliding mode trajectory
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(2020) 42:561
tracking control for wheeled mobile robots in the presence
of unknown external disturbances and inertia uncertainties.
The simulation results illustrated that the proposed control
strategy was effective to track the reference trajectory. Yet,
there are no experimental results in their studies. Korayem
et al. [13] investigated the performance of optimal control
for mobile robots in the presence of multiple obstacles. The
simulation and experiment results indicated that the sug-
gested method was feasible for these robots.
Sliding mode control was first introduced in the late
1950’s in the Soviet Union. Yet, the method was not well
known in the western literature until 1970’s due to linguistic
difficulties. After 1970’s, sliding mode control found many
application areas. The method is successfully applied to
automatic flight control, control of electric motors, chemical
processes control, helicopter stability augmentation systems,
space systems and robot manipulators.
The idea of the method is to drive and constrain the
system state to lie within a neighbourhood of a switch-
ing function. This approach has two main advantages.
First, the dynamic behaviour of the system may be tai-
lored by the choice of the switching function. Second,
the closed loop response becomes totally insensitive to
a particular class of uncertainty. Utkin [14] investigated
the properties of sliding modes on their studies in the
late 1970’s. Early works about sliding mode control are
given in Utkin [15]. The main disadvantage of using
SMC in practical implementations is chattering problem
which is caused by unmodelled dynamics, switching gain
value and discontinuous sign function in classical slid-
ing model control [16]. Many methods have been pro-
posed to reduce or remove the chattering problem such
as a boundary layer method [17], disturbance observer
[18], filtering of control signal [19], terminal sliding
mode control [20] and others. Suryawanshi et al. [21]
suggested boundary layer control to overcome the chat-
tering problem. In their method, the control is continuous
inside the boundary layer by switching to uncertainty and
disturbance estimator (UDE) and control is discontinuous
outside the boundary layer. The saturation function was
used inside the boundary layer at conventional SMC. Yet,
in proposed control scheme, the saturation function was
substituted with a first- or second-order UDE with filter
time constant. Therefore, the value of filter time constant
and order of filter affected the accuracy of estimation
directly [21]. While adding a boundary layer in classical
SMC to the chattering problem it reduces the controller’s
performance and may cause to a residual tracking error
[19]. The proposed terminal sliding mode control mod-
els [20, 22] in literature achieve good performance. Yet,
terminal sliding mode control has the singularity problem
Journal of the Brazilian Society of Mechanical Sciences and Engineering (2020) 42:561 Page 3 of 13 561

[23]. In order to overcome uncertainties on their system, where x, f(x), [B], u represent states, nonlinear terms, con-
Bessa et al. [24] suggested the combination of sliding trol matrix and control inputs. The aim of the controller is
mode control and an adaptive neural network to compen- to control the variable x under the system uncertainties and
sate hydrodynamic effects due to fluid–body interaction. hold the system on a sliding surface S. In order to obtain a
However, their main problem is ineffectiveness to obtain stable solution of the system, it must stay on this surface as
the bounds of the estimation error [25]. shown in Fig. 1.
Sliding mode controller proposed in this study provides The surface is described as:
an effective control on linear and nonlinear systems in the
presence of parameter uncertainties and unmodelled dynam-
S = {x− ∶ 𝜎− (x, t) = 0} (2)
ics. This control approach is based on converting nth-order The sliding surface equation for a control system can be
tracking problem into first-order stability problem. Moreo- selected as follows:
ver, sliding modes can be applied on unstable systems.
Since the method is based on Lyapunov’s direct method 𝜎 = [G] Δx = [G](xref − x) = [G]e (3)
(also called as the second method of Lyapunov), the stabil-
Δx is the difference between the reference value and the
ity of the system is guaranteed. Therefore, the controlled
system response which results in error vector e. [G] is the
system always becomes stable ever if they were not. The
matrix which represents the sliding surface slopes. This
controller forces the system to converge towards sliding
equation can be rearranged as follows:
surface by moving on different paces of trajectories while
states go zero. The major disadvantage could be the chat- 𝜎 = [G] xr −[G]x
tering problem which is a harmful to, especially mechani- ⏟⏟⏟ (4)
cal components of the engineering systems [16]. However, 𝜑(t)

the chattering problem is completely solved with enhanced

or
approaches in this paper.
This study aims to investigate the performance of a line 𝜎 = 𝜑(t) − [G]x (5)
following robot with SMC and traditional PID controller.
Since the usage of line following robots are increasing and For stability, the following Lyapunov function candidate has
used in factories and hospitals, it is crucial to enhance effi- to be positive definite and its derivative has to be negative
cient tracking performance. It was performed numerical and semi-definite:
experimental trials with a line following which was designed
( ) 𝜎T 𝜎
to recognize the path with nine infrared sensors. These sen- 𝜈 𝜎 = >0 (6)
sors obtained continuous streaming of the errors and motors 2
on the left and right wheel are changing direction to guide
the defined path. Due to unknown mechanical characteristics
of the robots such as friction on wheel and other parts of
the robot, the modelling and controlling of a line follower
robot might become complicated. Therefore, the robust non-
chattering SMC was preferred and compared with PID con-
troller. The parameters of both PID and SMC controller were
determined numerically. The experimental and numerical
results have been used to evaluate the effectiveness of the
controllers and discussed at the end.

2 Non‑chattering sliding mode controller

design

A controlled nonlinear dynamic system is described by the

following state space form:
ẋ = f (x) + [B] u (1)
Fig. 1  Phase plane of the state variables

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( )
≤0
d𝜈 𝜎 𝜎̇ T 𝜎 𝜎 T 𝜎̇
= + (7)
dt 2 2
If the limit condition is applied:
( )
d𝜈 𝜎
=0 (8)
dt
Since σ cannot be zero, than dσ/dt = 0,

d𝜎 d 𝜑(t)
= − [G]ẋ = 0 (9)
dt dt
From Eq. (1), Fig. 2  Time history of σ

d𝜑
− [G] (f (x) + [B] ueq ) = 0 (10)
dt
𝜎(t) = e−[𝛤 ] t + 𝜎(0) (15)
ueq is the controller input of the limit case and from Eq. (8),
( )
d 𝜑(t) As a result, non-chattering action is reached since it
(11)
−1
ueq = [G B] − [G] f (x)
dt does not contain sign term in Eq. (12) and satisfies condi-
tions of Lyapunov stability criteria. [Γ] is selected during
The classical sliding mode control theory suffers of two application.
problems: Then defining;
(1) The discontinuity in the control signal because of the
sign term in derivative of selected Lyapunov function: [K] = [GB]−1 [𝛤 ] (16)

v̇ = −𝜎 T [𝛤 ]sign 𝜎 ≤ 0 The control input vector is obtained:

( )
(12)
[Γ] is a positive matrix. But in this classical sliding mode
control theory there becomes chattering because of the
on–off action of the sign term which harms the mechanical
components seriously.(2) If the system knowledge is poor,
that means the knowledge of f(x) vector and [B] matrix is
poor, then the equivalent calculated control inputs u­ eq in
Eq. (11) will be too far off from the actual equivalent control
inputs resulting in unsatisfactory control performance.
Two new approaches have been improved for solving
these two problems:
First, the solution to the chattering problem is presented
below:
The derivative of a new Lyapunov function is chosen as
follows:
v̇ = −𝜎 T [𝛤 ]𝜎 < 0 (13)
Equating, Eq. (7) and Eq. (13):
𝜎̇ + [𝛤 ]𝜎 = 0 (14)
[Γ] decides the velocity of approach to sliding surface. Solv-
ing the Eq. (14) (Fig. 2):
u = ueq + [K] 𝜎 (17)
Second, the solution of poor system knowledge failure is
presented below:If the knowledge of f(x) vector and [B]
matrix is very poor, then the equivalent calculated control
inputs will be too far off from the actual equivalent con-
trol inputs. Therefore, in this study, it is suggested that the
equivalent control is the average of the total control. The
design of an averaging filter for estimation of the equivalent
control is suggested:
û eq =
1
u (18)
𝜏s + 1
This is actually a low-pass filter. The value of 1/τ gives
the cut-off frequency. The logic behind the designing a
low-pass filter is that low frequencies determine the char-
acteristics of the signal and high frequencies come from
unmodelled dynamics. Note that there is no need for system
knowledge of f(x) and [B] in this new solution. Then, the
control action becomes:
u = û eq + [K] 𝜎 (19)

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where ûeq is as defined in Eq. (18).
On the other hand, the conventional PID control is one of
the traditional control method that is still used today. There
are several studies on this subject. Pati and Kala [26] pre-
sented robot following based on computer and PID control
for a different wheel robots. They designed two robots. One
of this is designed for working as a master and the other one
is working as a follower. They applied PID controller for fol-
lower robot. From the experimental results, they understood
that the follower robot with PID controller could follow the
master robot with minimum tracking error. Singh and Chou-
han [27] designed a new, simple control methodology for
differential drive line following robot. The method contains
of a single PID controller to follow the line with constant
linear velocity. They presented simulation and experimental
results.
The main purpose of the PID control is to minimize the
error between the desired and actual state. Theoretically, the
reduction of the error is achieved by the proportional, deriv-
ative and integral controllers present in the control structure.
[ ]
m). The range of error was between − 8 and 8. If the error is
− 8 or 8, it means that the last sensor of the right or left side
of the robot can detect the line. Two motors were used at
the rear of the line following robot to take corrective action
based on the error signal. Therefore, pulse width modulated
(PWM) signals were provided to control the motors and the
right or left wheel was span to move the robot forward or
to change the direction of the robot. Power input was made
with 11.1 V 2100 mAh lipo battery. DC to DC step down
converter was used to adjust the voltage (Fig. 3).
On the other hand, before starting experiment, the math-
ematical model is derived and simulated on computer using
the model in Fig. 4. The mathematical model of the line
following robot is shown in equations below, and the experi-
mental line following robot was run afterwards. The param-
eters used in simulation, the list of electronic components

Ti ∫
1 de(t)
u(t) = K e(t) + e(t)dt + Td (20)
dt

The transfer function of the PID controller is shown in

Eq. (20). u(t); control input, e; term of the error, K; propor-
tional gain, Ti; proportional time constant, Td; derivative
time constant.

3 Experimental set‑up and mathematical

model

Arduino Mega is used as a microcontroller. Nine infrared

sensors mounted in front of the robot were used to get the
current deviation of line follower robot from the centre of
the black path (distance between each sensor 10.16 × 10−3 Fig. 4  Robot model

Fig. 3  Line following robot and

trajectory

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and Arduino connection pins are given in the “Appendices long, 2.45 m wide white ground. The path which the robot
A1 and A2”. must follow is designed to be 2.5 × 10−2 m width, black and
Iz is the total inertia, α is the angle between vertical global consists of 6 sections. Different path profiles were used to
y axis and the direction of robot displacement p, whereas examine the movement of the robot in each section as shown
­mt is the total mass of the robot. The angular speed of α is in Fig. 5.
given below in terms of angular speeds of wheels, θ1 and θ2,
respectively [28].
r ̇ 5 The numerical and experimental results
𝛼̇ = (𝜃 − 𝜃̇ 2 ) (21)
2L 1
The purpose of the study is that the robot tracks the desired
L is the between wheels, r is the radius of each wheel. The path with minimum trajectory error. For this, SMC and
speed of the robot is obtained by: PID control for comparison have been applied. The opti-
r ̇ mum parameter values of the sliding mode controller were
ṗ = (𝜃 + 𝜃̇ 2 ) (22) found by numerical solution. PID control parameters are also
2 1
obtained during numerical solution using the Ziegler–Nich-
Using the Lagrange equations and performing necessary ols method. They are given in “Appendix A1”.
manipulations, robot dynamic model is presented; In Fig. 6, the trajectory tracking errors of PID and SMC
[ ][ ̈ ] [ ][ ̇ ] [ ] controllers are presented. For both controllers, experimental
I11 I12 𝜃1 b1 0 𝜃1 𝜏1
+ = (23) and simulation results are shown at the same graph. When
I21 I22 𝜃̈2 0 b2 𝜃̇ 2 𝜏2 the figures are examined, it is seen that simulation and
experimental results give similar responses. It also appears
τ1 and τ2 are the control torques resulting of tractive effort from figures that the SMC controller performs better both
acting on left and right wheels, respectively. Their expres- in simulation and experiment.
sions in terms of control voltages, inertia matrix elements In simulation code, both engine models are the same,
­Iij and rotational viscous friction matrix elements ­bi are pre- there is no speed difference between the two wheels. For
sented in “Appendices A1 and A3”. this reason, when simulation starts, the robot moves on
straight line (Section 1–2) without any mistakes. However,
in experiment, since noise occurs during motor control, there
4 Path design are minor differences in the motors. This situation causes
small wobbles on robot during the straight line.
Both SMC and PID control parameters are obtained in In simulation, the sensors read data over the picture. It is
computer environment and then applied to robot for test not exposed to light changes and reflections. In fact, IR sen-
laboratory. The actual experimental path consists of 2.45 m sors are affected by neighbouring sensors due to reflection.

Fig. 5  Path design

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Fig. 6  Trajectory tracking errors

of SMC and PID

This situation causes delays in the perception of the lines. As except for Section 5–6 (Table 1). In Section 5–6, the results
a result, small time shifts occur between simulation studies of the two controllers are very close to each other. It is clear;
and experimental studies. Since SMC controller produces however, that the SMC controller is again better. Accord-
fast responses compared to PID Controller, the simulation ing to experimental data, the SMC controller consumes less
and experimental data with SMC are close to each other as energy than the PID controller and finishes the trajectory
shown in Fig. 6. more quickly (Table 2). Throughout the whole path, the
In Fig. 7, the experimental results of trajectory tracking SMC controller has %30 less total error than PID using the
errors of SMC and PID are shown. Each different sections equations.
in trajectory is determined by the section lines. Thus, the ti+1
behaviour of the controllers is clearly investigated. It is
Δti ∫
1
understood from the error values that the SMC controller is Average Section 𝐄𝐑𝐑𝐎𝐑 = |e|dt (24)
more successful in trajectory tracking in experimental path. ti
It is also seen that the SMC controller gives faster reactions,
adapts to changing conditions faster and stabilizes the error 5
ti+1
1 ∑
Δt i=1 ∫
in a shorter time. It must also emphasize that SMC con- Average Total 𝐄𝐑𝐑𝐎𝐑 = |e|dt (25)
trolled robot completes the track in 29.5 s, whereas PID one
t1
completes the track in 32.7 s experimentally.
When each section is examined separately, the SMC con- In Fig. 8, the controller voltages and total power used by
troller gives much better results than PID in each section PID and SMC controllers are presented for experimental

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Fig. 7  Experimental trajectory

tracking errors of SMC and PID

Table 1  Experimental Section 1–2 Section 2–3 Section 3–4 Section 4–5 Section 5–6
performance of controllers
Time elapsed (s)
SMC 2.8575 4.6275 7.3425 5.0925 9.5550
PID 3.1350 5.1600 8.2425 5.6175 10.5150
Average sectional error (m)
SMC 0.960 × 10−4 2.688 × 10−4 6.113 × 10−4 4.287 × 10−4 6.964 × 10−4
PID 2.892 × 10−4 8.705 × 10−4 6.938 × 10−4 6.715 × 10−4 6.433 × 10−4
Energy consumed (J)
SMC 0.0010 0.0018 0.0030 0.0019 0.0038
PID 0.0012 0.0020 0.0035 0.0024 0.0044

Table 2  Experimental performance of controllers throughout the total SMC controller needs lower voltages both in sharp turns and
trajectory straight lines on the path. Moreover, it seems that the sliding
Time(s) Average total error (m) Energy mode controller is more stable and requires lower voltage
consumed values than PID controller during the entire path.
(J) The visual experimental results of the tracking perfor-
SMC 29.4750 5.032 × 10−4 0.0116 mance of two controllers are presented in Fig. 9. Although
PID 32.6700 6.622 × 10−4 0.0135 SMC responds faster and provides better tracking perfor-
mance than PID controller in sharp turns, both SMC and
PID controllers are successful on the road with low distur-
bance. Yet, it is seen that the SMC controller is more effec-
and numerical results. It shows that the PID controller is tive on the road with dashed lines (Section 2–3) consumes
trying to track the trajectory by generating higher control less energy and finishes the track at a considerably shorter
voltages even on the straight line. It is understood that the time. Note that robot with SMC completes the track in

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Journal of the Brazilian Society of Mechanical Sciences and Engineering
Fig. 8  Controller voltages and
the power consumed
29.5 s, whereas the PID controlled robot barely completes
the track in 32.7 s.
In order to visualize the robust behaviour of the sliding
mode controlled robot, for different robot mass values, the
numerical solution of the tracking performance of the line
following robot is presented in Fig. 10. There is no sig-
nificant performance change for SMC controlled robot as
expected.
On the other hand, the tracking performance of the SMC
and PID controlled robot models has been simulated on a
harder trajectory and presented in Fig. 11. As observed in
Fig., the SMC controlled robot has a much superior tracking
performance than the PID one.
As a last test, a tracking line fault has been produced at
the beginning of the track Section 1–2. At the beginning,
(2020) 42:561 Page 9 of 13 561
0.060 m long tracking line part has been cut and removed
ahead having 0.075 m offset. Then, the tracking perfor-
mances of SMC and PID controlled robots have been
checked experimentally as presented in Fig. 12 and their
error history is in Fig. 13.
As tabulated on Fig. 13, the average total error of SMC
controlled robot after a faulted line test is much less than
the one of PID.
6 Conclusion
The purpose of this study is to design a successful controller
for line following robots. Therefore, the non-chattering slid-
ing mode controller was designed and compared with PID
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Fig. 9  Experimental results of the tracking performance
one. A complicated test path was used for this purpose. The
test path consists of five sections having different tracking
difficulties.
Two different controllers are applied to robot. First, PID
controller, which is one of the commonly used control meth-
ods in industry is designed for comparison. Then, SMC and
PID parameters were obtained in numerical analysis before
experimental tests.
Both computer simulation and experimental study were
presented in figures together with the trajectory tracking
Fig. 11  Tracking performance
of SMC and PID controlled
robots on an alternative test
trajectory
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(2020) 42:561
Fig. 10  Tracking performance of SMC controlled robot for different
mass values
errors of them. When the experimental data are examined, it
is observed that the SMC controller recovers the robot faster
in sharp turns. It is also understood that it has less trajectory
tracking errors in the dashed line section on which it is hard
to follow. It is generally deduced that the SMC controller is
much more successful than PID controller in terms of track-
ing performance. Moreover, it is also seen that the SMC con-
troller is consuming less energy and finishes the trajectory
more quickly than PID one. As a result, SMC finishes the
track % 10.83 faster, produces error % 31.60 lower, consumes
Journal of the Brazilian Society of Mechanical Sciences and Engineering (2020) 42:561 Page 11 of 13 561

Fig. 12  Experimental tracking

performance of SMC and PID
controlled robots after a faulted
start line

Fig. 13  Experimental tracking

errors and average total errors
of SMC and PID controlled
robots after a faulted start line

energy % 16.38 less on the track. Afterwards, the robust-

ness of the SMC controlled robot has been tested for differ-
ent robot masses resulting in expected success. Then, SMC
and PID controlled robots have been run on a harder track
resulting in superior performance of SMC one. Then, experi-
mentally SMC and PID controlled robots have been started
on a faulted track line, and it has been verified that SMC
controlled robot finishes the track having very low average
tracking error compared with the other controller. Finally, it
has been concluded that non-chattering SMC controlled line
following robot proposed in this study has a very satisfactory
tracking performance under all hard working conditions.

Appendices

A1

Fig. 14  Electronic and mechanical parts of the robot See Table 3.

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Table 3  Robot, SMC and PID parameters Table 5  Arduino pin connections

mt 0.6 kg Total mass Arduino pins Components

Iz 1.3853 × 10−3 ­kgm2 Total inertia A0 Sensor 1
b1,b2 0.0011 N.m.s/rad Rotational viscous friction
A1 Sensor 2
r 0.0295 m Radius of the wheel
A2 Sensor 3
L 0.1276 m Distance between wheels
A3 Sensor 4
τmax 0.0387 N.m Maximum torque
A4 Sensor 5
K 23.4 Proportionality constant
A5 Sensor 6
Ti 79.7954 s Integral time constant
A6 Sensor 7
Td 0.002 s Derivative time constant
A7 Sensor 8
Γi 75 SMC coefficient
A8 Sensor 9
τi 1.5 s SMC time constant
A14 Sensor 10 (side face)
A15 Sensor 11 (side face)
D06 Left engine forward
D09 Left engine back
D10 Right engine forward
A2: Electronic and mechanical part list
D11 Right engine back
D00 (Rx) Serial communication transmitter
See Tables 4 and 5.
D01 (TX) Serial communication transmitter

A3

Table 4  The materials list of line following robot (Fig. 14) Coefficients of mass matrix:
( 2 )
Number Materials name Iz r mt r2
I11 = I22 = +
1 Lipo battery L2 4
2 Body
3 Left motor holder
( )
mt r2 Iz r2
4 O-Ring I12 = I21 = − 2
4 L
5 Left DC motor
6 Arduino Mega Electrical equations of motors [29]:
7 Right motor holder
8 Right DC motor
din (t)
Vn (t) = Rn in (t) + Ln + Kn wn (t) n = 1, 2.
9 Wheel body dt
10 Line following module (2 Sensors) 𝜏n (t) = Kn wn (t)
11 1.5 × 10−2 m metal ball en (t) = Kn In (t)
12 5 × 10−3 m metal ball Pin
n (t) = Vn In (t)
13 Free wheel body
Pout
n (t) = 𝜏n wn (t)
14 Line following module (9 sensors)
15 3 × 10−2 m upgrade part Where,
16 L298N motor driver
Vn Input voltage;
In Armature current;

13
Journal of the Brazilian Society of Mechanical Sciences and Engineering
Rn Armature resistance;
Ln Armature inductance;
Kn EMF constant;
θ An angular displacement of rotor;
𝜏1 , 𝜏2 Motor torque;
en Back electromotive force (EMF);
Pin
n Input power;
Pout
n Output power
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