Robust sliding mode control for flexible arms

In this paper, we consider the robust control of one link flexible arms by using sliding mode method. The higher order modes of the flexible arm are treated as disturbances, and are compensated by introducing a special filter. The remained disturbance and the model uncertainties are considered as the system uncertainty. The robustness of the sliding mode control is effectively employed to cope with the system uncertainty, where the upper and lower bounds of the uncertainty are adaptively updated. The stability of the closed-loop system is analyzed by using the fact that a part of the control input is the approximate estimate of the uncertainty. Experimental results show the robustness of the proposed method.