Practical continuous fractional-order nonsingular terminal sliding mode control of underwater hydraulic manipulators with valve deadband compensators

Abstract

For the multi-degrees of freedom control problem of underwater hydraulic manipulators with non-ignorable valve deadband and strong lumped nonlinearities and uncertainties, a practical continuous fractional-order nonsingular terminal sliding mode control design together with a deadband compensator is presented and studied. The presented method contains three parts a time delay estimation utilized to nearly estimate and compensate the extremely complicated system dynamics, a continuous fractional-order nonsingular terminal sliding mode used to ensure high control performance against the strong lumped nonlinearities and uncertainties, and a valve deadband compensator used to compensate for the non-ignorable valve deadband. The proposed method is model-free thanks to the time delay estimation, and can ensure satisfactory control performance thanks to the continuous fractional-order nonsingular terminal sliding mode and deadband compensator. Stability of the closed-loop control system including the deadband compensator is proved rigorously. Finally, practical 2-degrees of freedom experiments are performed, and corresponding results effectively demonstrate the superiorities of the newly presented controller with deadband compensator.