Control of Robot Manipulators Using Time-Delay Estimation and Fuzzy Logic Systems

A highly accurate model-free controller is proposed for trajectory tracking control of robot manipulators. The proposed controller incorporates time-delay estimation (TDE) to estimate and cancel continuous nonlinearities of robot dynamics, and exploits fuzzy logic systems to suppress the effect of the TDE error, which is due to discontinuous nonlinearities such as friction. To this end, integral sliding mode is defined using desired error dynamics, and a Mamdani-type fuzzy inference system is constructed. As a result, the proposed controller achieves the desired error dynamics well. Implementation of the proposed controller is easy because the design of the controller is intuitive and straightforward, and calculations of the complex robot dynamics are not required. The tracking performance of the proposed controller is verified experimentally using a 3-degree of freedom PUMA-type robot manipulator.