In this article, a continuous terminal sliding mode control algorithm is proposed for servo motor systems. A novel full-order terminal sliding mode surface is proposed based on the bilimit homogeneous property, such that the sliding motion is finite-time stable independent of the system's initial condition. A new continuous terminal sliding mode control algorithm is proposed to guarantee that the system states reach the sliding surface in finite-time. Not only the robustness is guaranteed by the proposed controller but also the continuity makes the control algorithm more suitable for the servo mechanical systems. Finally, a numerical example is presented to depict the advantages of the proposed control algorithm. An application in the rotary servo system is done to validate the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.

This paper presents a new cascaded extended state observer (CESO) based sliding mode control (SMC) for an underactuated flexible joint robot (FJR). The control of FJR has many challenges including coupling, underactuation, nonlinearity, uncertainties and external disturbances, and the noise amplification especially in the high order systems. The proposed control integrates CESO and SMC, in which the CESO estimates the states and disturbances, and the SMC provides the system robustness to the uncertainty and disturbance estimation errors. Firstly, a dynamic model of the FJR is derived and converted from an underactuated form to a canonical form via the Olfati transformation and flatness approach, which reduces the complexity of the controller design. Furthermore, by taking the advantage of available measurable states, the CESO is adopted to attenuate the noises and make SMC feasible for high order systems. Moreover, the CESO estimates the disturbances, which relaxes the upper bound of the disturbance in the SMC and reduces the chattering due to smaller switching gains. A stability analysis of the closed loop system is presented based on the Lyapunov method. The effectiveness of the proposed control is verified experimentally on a real time FJR system.

Flexible joint robot (FJR) manipulators can offer many attractive features over rigid manipulators, including light weight, safe operation, and high power efficiency. However, the tracking control of the FJR is challenging due to its inherent problems, such as underactuation, coupling, nonlinearities, uncertainties, and unknown external disturbances. In this article, a terminal sliding mode control (TSMC) is proposed for the FJR system to guarantee the finite-time convergence of the systems output, and to achieve the total robustness against the lumped disturbance and estimation error. By using two coordinate transformations, the FJR dynamics is turned into a canonical form. A cascaded finite-time sliding mode observer (CFTSMO) is constructed to estimate states and lumped disturbance in a finite time based on two measurable states, which not only attenuates the measurement noise but also reduces the peaking phenomenon. The closed-loop stability and the finite-time convergence are rigorously proved by using Lyapunov theorem. The upper bound of the finite convergence time is derived for the reaching and sliding phase. Comparative study is conducted experimentally in real time on the FJR manipulator to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control method.

The flexible joint robot (FJR) typically experiences parametric variations, non-linearities, underactuation, noise propagation, and external disturbances which seriously degrade the FJR tracking. This paper proposes an adaptive integral sliding mode controller (AISMC) based on a singular perturbation method and two state observers for the FJR to achieve high performance. Firstly, the underactuated FJR is modelled into two simple second order fast and slow subsystem by using Olfati transformation and singular perturbation method, which handles underactuation while reducing noise amplification. Then, the AISMC is proposed to effectively accomplish the desired tracking performance, in which the integral sliding surface is designed to reduce chattering based on two state observers with no requirements of the velocity and acceleration measurements in the FJR system. Furthermore, an adaptive laws for switching gains are proposed for both slow and fast subsystems in the FJR to remove the requirements of knowing the up-bound of the disturbances and uncertainties. The closed loop stability of not only slow and fast subsystems but also the overall FJR is proved using the Lyapunov theorem. Finally, the simulation and experimental results demonstrate the superiority of proposed control in terms of less tracking error, significant noise suppression, and strong robustness in comparison with existing controllers.

To handle input and output time delays that com-monly exist in many networked control systems (NCSs), a new robust continuous sliding mode control (CSMC) scheme is proposed for the output tracking in uncertain single input-single-out-put (SISO) networked control systems. This scheme consists of three consecutive steps. First, although the network-induced delay in those systems can be effectively handled by using Pade approximation (PA), the unmatched disturbance cames out as another difficulty in the control design. Second, to actively estimate this unmatched disturbance, a generalized proportional integral observer (GPIO) technique is utilized based on only one measured state. Third, by constructing a new sliding manifold with the aid of the estimated unmatched disturbance and states, a GPIO-based CSMC is synthesized, which is employed to cope with not only matched and unmatched disturbances, but also net-work-induced delays. The stability of the entire closed-loop system under the proposed GPIO-based CSMC is detailedly analyzed. The promising tracking efficiency and feasibility of the proposed control methodology are verified through simulations and experiments on Quanser's servo module for motion control under various test conditions.