A modified sliding mode controller for the position control of a direct drive arm

In this paper, a new hybrid position control algorithm for the direct drive arm is proposed. The proposed control is composed of discrete feedforward component and continuous feedback component. The discrete component is the nominal torque which approximately compensates the strong nonlinear coupling torques between the links, while the continuous control is a modified version of sliding mode control which is known to have a robust property to the disturbances of system. For the proposed control law, we give sufficient condition which guarantees the bounded tracking error in spite of the modeling errors, and the efficiency of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated by the numerical simulation of a three link manipulator position control with payloads and parameter errors.