On the Robust Trajectory Tracking Task for Flexible-Joint Robotic Arm with Unmodeled Dynamics

This paper is concerned with the design and experimental assessment of, both, feedback linearization and sliding mode control techniques to the tracking trajectory problem of a flexible-joint robotic arm for a smooth rest to rest maneuver. The robust improvement of these controllers is analyzed by means of additional integral compensation, in which an alternative sliding surface was proposed for the control of the flexible arm. A feedback linearization of the nonlinear dynamic equation of the robot arm is computed in order to get a full-state non-linear feedback control law. On the other hand, it is proposed a second order sliding mode control with an integral term in the sliding surface, which improves the robustness of the controller sliding surface. Some experimental evaluations that include the addition of external unmodeled perturbations to test the enhancement of the robustness property show the improvements and effectiveness of the proposed control laws in disturbance rejection tasks. The controllers were implemented using exclusively position measurements and time derivatives approximations.