Design and Evaluation of Adaptive and Sliding Mode Control for a 3-DOF Delta Parallel Robot

In this paper, simulation, kinematics analysis, and control of a 3-DOF Delta parallel robot have been investigated. Delta parallel robots are one of the most popular manipulators for industrial applications. The kinematic equations of the robot have been established by the screw theory, in which, the position and velocity analyses have been carried out. In SimScape simulation environment, the kinematic model of the robot has been verified and subsequently, an inverse kinematic model was adopted for control purposes. In order to improve the tracking ability of the robot, three important control approaches, consisting in PID, adaptive control, and a Sliding Mode Control (SMC) have been implemented. Afterwards, the effectiveness of each approach has been investigated by employing the root mean square error (RMSE) index. By comparing the obtained index values, the SMC demonstrates the best performance with the RMSE value of 0.4188 in comparison to other methods. Simulation results were illustrated to show the ability of the controllers to reject white noise disturbance added to the system's input signals.