In this paper, an adaptive intelligent controller is developed for the velocity-tracking problem of a nonholonomic wheeled mobile robot (WMR) in the presence of external disturbances and measurement noises. The whole control system is consisting of two subsystems, where each subsystem has its own control responsibility. In this way, first, a kinematic controller is implemented according to the kinematic model of the robot, and then a dynamic controller is designed based on the characteristic of the robot dynamics. Our focus is designing and developing an adaptive fractional-order fuzzy logic proportional–integral–derivative (FOFPID) controller for the trajectory-tracking task in a two-WMR. Unlike the prevalent works which only designed the scaling factors of FOFPID, a simultaneous optimization of fuzzy membership functions and controller coefficients are realized to improve the efficiency of the WMR dynamic controller. Accordingly, the controller parameters are optimally adjusted by employing a combination of the sin cos algorithm and harmony search, called SCA-HS. To validate the applicability of the suggested framework, experimental studies are also conducted on a real-time platform using a two-WMR prototype. The experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed controller for the exact trajectory-tracking problem in the presence of disturbances and noises.