Sliding mode control of a three degrees of freedom anthropoid robot by driving the controller parameters to an equivalent regime

Noise rejection, handling the difficulties coming from the mathematical representation of the system under investigation and alleviation of structural or unstructural uncertainties constitute prime challenges that are frequently encountered in the practice of systems and control engineering. Designing a controller has primarily the aim of achieving the tracking precision as well as a degree of robustness against the difficulties stated. From this point of view, variable structure systems theory offer well formulated solutions to such ill-posed problems containing uncertainty and imprecision. In this paper, a simple controller structure is discussed. The architecture is known as Adaptive Linear element (ADALINE) in the framework of neural computing. The parameters of the controller evolve dynamically in time such that a sliding motion is obtained. The inner sliding motion concerns the establishment of a sliding mode in controller parameters, which aims to minimize the error on the controller outputs. The outer sliding motion is designed for the plant. The algorithm discussed drives the error on the output of the controller toward zero learning error level, and the state tracking error vector of the plant is driven toward the origin of the phase space simultaneously. The paper gives the analysis of the equivalence between the two sliding motions and demonstrates the performance of the algorithm on a three degrees of freedom, anthropoid robotic manipulator. In order to clarify the performance of the scheme, together with the dynamic complexity of the plant, the adverse effects of observation noise and nonzero initial conditions are studied. [S0022-0434(00)01704-4].