Tracking Control of Manipulators with Unknown Disturbances: A Novel Fully Actuated System Method

This paper introduces a novel prescribed error performance control algorithm for robotic manipulators, designed to enhance the convergence speed of both position and velocity tracking in the presence of external disturbances. The proposed approach integrates the Fully Actuated System (FAS) framework with an adaptive sliding mode control strategy. By using the FAS method, the design of the intermediate control law is significantly streamlined, obviating the need for complex Lyapunov function derivations inherent in conventional control schemes. The resultant controller guarantees the convergence of tracking errors along a predefined, customizable error trajectory, thereby enabling precise control over convergence rate and overshoot characteristics. A key feature of this work is the incorporation of a self-adaptive mechanism that estimates and compensates for unknown external disturbances, bolstering robustness without requiring a priori knowledge of disturbance bounds. Consequently, high-precision tracking performance is achieved within specified time intervals. The efficacy and adaptability of the proposed control algorithm are rigorously validated through numerical simulations, demonstrating its potential for practical robotic applications.