Research on Sliding Mode Control of Robot Fingers Driven by Tendons Based on Nonlinear Disturbance Observer

To reduce weight and improve dexterity performance, dexterous robot fingers usually use tendons for transmission, which may lead to complex nonlinear control problems. In order to improve tracking performance in joint space, this paper proposes an anti-interference controller, which synthesizes the nonsingular fast terminal sliding mode technique. A flexible joint dynamic model is established considering the flexibility of the cable-driven mechanism. A nonlinear disturbance observer is adopted to estimate and compensate the system uncertainties and various disturbances, and global fast terminal sliding mode is used to ensure good control performance in both the reaching phase and the sliding mode phase. Furthermore, symmetry is used to simplify dynamic modeling and control design, and the stability of the controller is proven with Lyapunov theory. Finally, the effectiveness of the controller is verified through simulation experiments. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed controller achieves a steady state in 0.3 s, higher tracking accuracy than the other controllers through quantitative analysis of MAE and MSE metrics, and stronger anti-interference capability, which can satisfy the requirements of finger dexterity operation.