Fractional synergetic tracking control for robot manipulator

This work takes advantage of synergetic control theory and fractional calculus to develop and propose fractional synergetic control (FSC) strategy for Four Degrees of Freedom (4-DOF) robot manipulator. The proposed fractional synergetic control is designed to track a joint space as well as workspace desired trajectories. Fractional calculus gives more flexibility in the design since it has a wider stability region. Added to that, as stated in the literature, compared to a similar approach such as sliding mode control, the synergetic control approach converges faster to the equilibrium point, without chattering with a fast response. This paper proposes a new control strategy that takes advantage of fractional calculus and synergetic control theory. This proposed control strategy is tested experimentally on a 4-DOF manipulator to study the performance of the proposed control scheme. The stability of the closed-loop system is proved using the Lyapunov approach. The experimental results have shown that the proposed FSC design has achieved a good tracking performance.