SMC Design for Flexible Link Manipulator in Presence of External Disturbances

A flexible link manipulator (FLM) has become the globally research topic over last two decades. It has various advantages such as light weight, high speed with low inertia, large work space and consumes less energy comparatively. However, this flexibility make system more complex. The FLM performance is measured in terms of accuracy of trajectory tracking with minimum oscillations. But in case of FLM, due to flexibility, oscillation and accuracy in trajectory has been increased. To overcome this problem, a robust nonlinear observer based sliding mode controller (SMC) has been used in this paper. Moreover, dynamics modelling of FLM has been developed using Lagrange Method. To enhance the tracking of FLM, integral sliding mode controller (i-SMC) has been designed. The effectiveness of these controller has been tested in presence of disturbances at each state and result obtained are demonstrated