A Robust Control Law with Estimated Perturbation Compensation for Robot Manipulators

By considering the dynamic response of a robot manipulator as characterized by the sliding function, a technique is proposed to estimate the perturbation in the robot control system. Perturbation compensation is then incorporated in the design of a robust control law to cancel the effects of system parametric uncertainties and external disturbances. A normalized power rate component is introduced to replace the discontinuous control that is usually associated with variable structure system. The suggested robust control law ensures that the robot control system reaches an user specified neighbourhood of the sliding manifold in finite time and with prescribed transient behaviour. Explicit estimates of the bounds on modelling errors and external disturbances are not required while signal measurement uncertainties can be accommodated. Furthermore, using the equivalent control concept, a very simple expression is derived to estimate the system perturbation signal. Detailed computer simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control law.