Flexible Joints Robotic Manipulator Control by Adaptive Gain Smooth Sliding Observer-Controller

Abstract

An adaptive gain sliding observer for uncertain parameter nonlinear systems together with an adaptive gain sliding controller is proposed in this paper. It considered nonlinear, SISO affine systems, with uncertainties in steady-state functions and parameters. A further parameter term, adaptively updated, has been introduced in steady state space model of the controlled system, in order to obtain useful information despite fault detection and isolation. By using of the sliding observer with adaptive gain, the robustness to uncertainties is increased and the parameters adaptively updated can provide useful information in fault detection. Also, the state estimation error is bounded accordingly with bound limits of the uncertainties. The both of them, the sliding adaptive observer and sliding controller are designed to fulfill the attractiveness condition of its corresponding switching surface. An application to a single arm with flexible joint robot is presented. In order to alleviate chattering, a parameterized tangent hyperbolic has been used as switching function, instead of pure relay one, to the observer and the controller. Also, the gains of the switching functions, to the sliding observer and sliding controller are adaptively updated depending of estimation error and tracking error, respectively. By the using adaptive gains, the transient and tracking response can be improved.