Balancing control for the pendubot using sliding mode

The problem of finding control laws for underactuated systems has attracted growing attention since these systems are characterized by the fact that they have fewer actuators than the degrees of freedom to be controlled. In this paper, a sliding mode control with integral sliding function is proposed for the pendubot which is a planar two-link robotic arm in the vertical plane with an actuator at the shoulder, but no actuator at the elbow. Using Mathworks´ Simulink/Simscape, the pendubot dynamics is implemented and the proposed control is constructed. Simulations demonstrate the effectiveness and usefulness of the proposed control.