Terminal sliding mode control for rigid robots

This paper presents a new design of terminal sliding mode control for n-link rigid robot manipulators. By exploring thoroughly some properties of robot manipulators, the proposed scheme simplifies significantly the controller designs given in Venkataraman and Gulati (1989) and Man et al. (1994). Compared to the linear sliding mode control, the main features of this terminal sliding mode control are the reduced tracking error in the steady state and reduced control efforts in the transient state. Experiment results are included to show the performance of the proposed controller.