Control Of Two Link Flexible Manipulator Using Higher Order Sliding Modes and Disturbance Estimation

The higher order sliding mode control (HOSMC) theory is applied to a two link flexible manipulator (2LFM) in this paper. This scheme effectively renders its properties of continuous control and robustness to matched perturbations to the 2LFM plant. Presence of matched disturbance in input channel requires controller gains to be increased to larger values for desired performance. This issue, is proposed to be tackled by estimating the disturbance using a disturbance observer (DO), and compensating the estimated signal in input channel. This is shown to yield optimum control efforts. The efficacy of this scheme as applied to 2LFM is validated in simulation.