Fuzzy Sliding Mode Control of Robotic Manipulators With Kinematic and Dynamic Uncertainties

Sliding mode control is a very attractive control scheme with strong robustness to structured and unstructured uncertainties as well as to external disturbances. In this paper, a robust fuzzy sliding mode controller, which is combined with an adaptive fuzzy logic system, is proposed to improve the control performance of the robotic manipulator with kinematic and dynamic uncertainties. In this controller, the sliding mode control is employed to improve the control accuracy and the robustness of the robotic manipulator, and the fuzzy logic control is adopted to approximate various uncertainties and to eliminate the chattering without the help of any prior knowledge of system uncertainties. The effectiveness of the proposed controller is then verified by the simulations on a 2-DOF (degrees of freedom) robotic manipulator and the experiments on an SCARA robot with four degrees of freedom. Simulated and experimental results indicate that the proposed controller is effective in the robust tracking of the robotic manipulator with kinematic and dynamic uncertainties. [DOI: 10.1115/1.4006626]