Discrete-time sliding mode control coupled with asynchronous sensor fusion for rigid-link flexible-joint manipulators

This paper proposes a discrete-time sliding mode controller coupled with an asynchronous multi-rate sensor fusion estimator which estimates the state of a rigid-link flexible-joint manipulator with visual sensing. In the multiple sensors robotic system, the fusion estimate method deals with the slow sampling rate and the latency of vision sensors by using motor encoders to cover the missing information between two visual samples. The discrete-time sliding mode uses the state estimation from fusion estimator which unique modifications simplify the design of the controller. The effectiveness of the proposed controller is illustrated by a computer simulation.