Sliding mode control for robust and smooth reference tracking in robot visual servoing

An approach based on sliding mode is proposed in this work for reference tracking in robot visual servoing. In particular, 2 sliding mode controls are obtained depending on whether joint accelerations or joint jerks are considered as the discontinuous control action. Both sliding mode controls are extensively compared in a 3D-simulated environment with their equivalent well-known continuous controls, which can be found in the literature, to highlight their similarities and differences. The main advantages of the proposed method are smoothness, robustness, and low computational cost. The applicability and robustness of the proposed approach are substantiated by experimental results using a conventional 6R industrial manipulator (KUKA KR 6 R900 sixx [AGILUS]) for positioning and tracking tasks.