Robust sliding composite adaptive control for mechanical manipulators with finite error convergence time

Abstract

In this paper a new robust adaptive control scheme for mechanical manipulators is presented. The design basically consists of, on the one hand, a composite adaptive controller which implements a feedback law that compensates the modelled dynamics and, on the other hand, a nonlinear sliding mode control law that overcomes the unmodelled dynamics and noise. It is proved that the resulting closed-loop system is stable and that the trajectory-tracking error converges to zero in finite time. Moreover, an upper bound of this error convergence time is calculated. Finally, the design is evaluated by means of simulations.