Practical adaptive fractional‐order nonsingular terminal sliding mode control for a cable‐driven manipulator.

Summary: For the high precise tracking control purpose of a cable‐driven manipulator under lumped uncertainties, a novel adaptive fractional‐order nonsingular terminal sliding mode control scheme based on time delay estimation (TDE) is proposed and investigated in this paper. The proposed control scheme mainly has three elements, ie, a TDE element applied to properly compensate the lumped unknown dynamics of the system resulting in a fascinating model‐free feature; a fractional‐order nonsingular terminal sliding mode (FONTSM) surface element used to ensure high precision in the steady phase; and a combined reaching law with adaptive technique adopted to obtain fast convergence and high precision and chatter reduction under complex lumped disturbance. Stability of the closed‐loop control system is analyzed with the Lyapunov stability theory. Comparative simulations and experiments were performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed control scheme using 2‐DOF (degree of freedom) of a cable‐driven manipulator named Polaris‐I. Corresponding results show that our proposed method can ensure faster convergence, higher precision, and better robustness against complex lumped disturbance than the existing TDE‐based FONTSM and continuous FONTSM control schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]