Sliding Mode Control of Flexible Articulated Manipulator Based on Robust Observer

In this paper, a robust observer-based sliding mode control algorithm is proposed to address the modelling and measurement inaccuracies, load variations, and external disturbances of flexible articulated manipulators. Firstly, a sliding mode observer was designed with exponential convergence to observe system state accurately and to overcome the measuring difficulty of the state variables, unmeasurable quantities, and external disturbances. Next, a robust sliding mode controller was developed based on the observer, such that the output error of the system converges to zero in finite time. In this way, the whole system achieves asymptotic stability. Finally, the convergence conditions of the observer were theoretically analyzed to verify the convergence of the proposed algorithm, and simulation was carried out to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method.