Vibration suppression control of flexible arms using sliding mode method

The vibration motion of the flexible arm has an infinite number of modes. The higher order modes of the flexible arm are considered as the disturbances. Since the payload mass is usually unknown, the model uncertainties usually exist. The sliding surface is designed such that the dynamics on the surface are stable under the sliding mode control. The robustness of sliding mode control is effectively employed to compensate the model uncertainties and the disturbances. For different payloads, experimental results show that the robustness of the proposed method is superior to that of the traditional pole-placement methods