Robust adaptive control of a micro telemanipulation system using sliding mode-based force estimation

Piezoelectric actuators are widely used in micro manipulation applications. However, hysteresis nonlinearity limits the accuracy of these actuators. This paper presents a novel approach for utilizing a piezoelectric nano-stage as the slave manipulator of a teleoperation system based on a sliding mode controller. The Prandtl-Ishlinskii (PI) model is used to model actuator hysteresis in feedforward scheme to cancel out this nonlinearity. The presented approach requires full state and force measurements at both the master and slave sides. Such a system is costly and also difficult to implement. Therefore, sliding mode unknown input observer (UIO) is proposed for full state and force estimations. Furthermore, the effects of uncertainties in the constant parameters on the estimated external forces should be eliminated. So, a robust adaptive controller is proposed and its stability is guaranteed through the Lyapunov criterion. Performance of the proposed control architecture is verified through experiments.