Sliding backstepping control design for robotic manipulator systems with motor dynamics

In many industrial applications, the end-effectors of robotic manipulators are required to move from one place to the other and follow some desired trajectories accurately. This paper proposes the nonlinear backstepping design with sliding mode control (SMC) scheme for the trajectory tracking of a robotic manipulator. The main control objective here is not only to track the desired trajectory, but also to cope with the system uncertainty. For realization, the motor dynamics would be considered in our system model. In general, the backstepping with SMC controller can be successfully developed to achieve our control goals for the robot arm system with N links. In addition, an adaptive backstepping design method is proposed to deal with the system uncertainty for the position tracking control of this robotic manipulator. Finally, some comparative simulations are given to illustrate the good performance of the proposed control schemes applied to a two-link robot arm.