Robust Composite High-Order Super-Twisting Sliding Mode Control of Robot Manipulators

This paper describes the design of a robust composite high-order super-twisting sliding mode controller (HOSTSMC) for robot manipulators. Robot manipulators are extensively used in industrial manufacturing for many complex and specialized applications. These applications require robots with nonlinear mechanical architectures, resulting in multiple control challenges in various applications. To address this issue, this paper focuses on designing a robust composite high-order super-twisting sliding mode controller by combining a higher-order super-twisting sliding mode controller as the main controller with a super-twisting higher-order sliding mode observer as unknown state measurement and uncertainty estimator in the presence of uncertainty. The proposed method adaptively improves the traditional sliding mode controller (TSMC) and the estimated state sliding mode controller (ESMC) to attenuate the chattering. The effectiveness of a HOSTSMC is tested over six degrees of freedom (DOF) using a Programmable Universal Manipulation Arm (PUMA) robot manipulator. The proposed method outperforms the TSMC and ESMC, yielding 4.9% and 2% average performance improvements in the output position root-mean-square (RMS) error and average error, respectively.