Sliding mode control of manipulators using first-order equations of motion with diagonal mass matrix

This paper presents a proposition of a sliding mode controller for a rigid manipulator expressed in terms of the generalized velocity components (GVC) vector. Introduction of GVC (Trans. ASME J. Appl. Mech. 62 (1995) 216) together with generalized positions leads to two first-order decoupled equations of motion instead of a single second-order equation. It is shown that the new controller, stable in the sense of Lyapunov, has different properties and can, according to Slotine and Li (Int. J. Robotics Res. 6 (1987) 49), give better performance than the classical sliding mode controller. Both control algorithms were tested on a 3 d.o.f., 3- D Yasukawa-like robot.