Validation of a Classical Sliding Mode Control Applied to a Physical Robotic Arm with Six Degrees of Freedom

Abstract

The control of robotic manipulators has become increasingly difficult over recent years due to their high accuracy, performance, speed, and reliability in a variety of applications, such as industry, medicine, research, etc. These serial manipulator systems are extremely complex because their dynamic models include perturbations, parametric variations, coupled nonlinear dynamics, and non-modular dynamics, all of which require robust control for trajectory tracking. This paper compares two control techniques: computational torque control (CTC) and sliding mode control (SMC). In this study, the latter was used for a physical robotic arm with six degrees of freedom (DOF) and online experiments were conducted, which have received little attention in the literature. As a result, the contribution of this work was based on the real-time application of this controller via a self-developing interface. The great resilience of sliding mode controllers to disturbances was also demonstrated in this study.