Adaptive Trajectory Tracking Control for Manipulators Based on Receding Horizon Optimization and Sliding Mode Robust Compensation

With the rapid development of modern industry, robotic manipulators are required to achieve increasingly high trajectory-tracking accuracy and robustness in practical applications. To enhance tracking performance under complex operating conditions, this paper proposes an Adaptive Model Predictive Control with Sliding-Mode Robust Compensation (AMPC–SMC) scheme that integrates an adaptive mechanism with sliding-mode control theory. First, a dynamic model of the manipulator is established, and parameter linearization is employed to transform the nonlinear dynamics into a linearly parameterized form with unknown parameters. Second, an adaptive law is derived based on Lyapunov stability theory to update the model parameters online, thereby mitigating the adverse effects of parametric perturbations and external disturbances on tracking accuracy. Building on this, a receding-horizon optimization strategy is introduced by formulating a quadratic cost function that penalizes both tracking errors and control effort, and the optimal control input is obtained by solving the resulting optimization problem. Meanwhile, a sliding-mode term is incorporated as a robust compensator to eliminate residual tracking errors. Finally, the desired trajectory is generated via point-to-point path planning in Cartesian space, and the proposed method is validated on a real six-degree-of-freedom robotic manipulator. Comparative experiments against conventional model predictive control (MPC) and traditional sliding-mode control (SMC) demonstrate that the proposed AMPC-SMC controller achieves remarkably superior tracking performance compared with the conventional MPC and SMC controllers. In terms of tracking accuracy, the mean absolute errors (MAE) of Joint 2, Joint 4 and Joint 5 under AMPC-SMC are reduced by 91.7%, 92.1% and 86.1% respectively relative to MPC, and decreased by 76.1%, 77.3% and 85.1% compared with the standalone SMC controller.