Robotic Manipulator Control with Model-Independent Sliding Modes

In this study, a model-independent sliding mode control technique is studied for robustly controlling robot arms. Control issues caused by the nonlinear dynamics of robot mechanisms and load disturbances can be effectively handled by the sliding modes with integral actions. The proposed method does not need any model information and requires only selection of several parameters. The particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is implemented to minimize the integral-squared-error (ISE) cost function for fine tuning the controller gains. The PUMA-560 robotic manipulator is used to test the model-independent control strategy, and it is shown that the suggested controller can achieve non-overshoot and fast response, and robust disturbance rejection performance under measurement noise and load perturbations.