Sliding mode method based vibration control of flexible arms

In this paper, we consider the vibration suppression control of flexible arms by using the sliding mode method. Higher order modes of the flexible arm are treated as disturbances, and are compensated by introducing a special filter. The remaining disturbance and model uncertainties are considered as the system uncertainty. The robustness of the sliding mode control is effectively employed to cope with the system uncertainty, where the upper and lower bounds of the uncertainty are adaptively updated. The stability of the closed-loop system is analyzed by using the fact that a part of the control input is the approximate estimate of the uncertainty. Experimental results show the robustness and superiority of the proposed method.