Design of adaptive optimal robust control for two-flexible-link manipulators in the presence of matched uncertainties

This study uses a comprehensive control approach to deal with the trajectory tracking problem of a two-flexible-link manipulator subjected to model uncertainties. Because the control inputs of two-flexible-link manipulators are less than their state variables, the proposed controller should be able to tackle the stated challenge. Practically speaking, there is only a single control signal for each joint, which can be used to suppress link deflections and control joint trajectories. To achieve this objective, a novel optimal robust control scheme, with an updated gain under the adaptive law, has been developed in this work for the first time. In this regard, a nonsingular terminal sliding mode control approach is used as the robust controller and a control Lyapunov function is used as the optimal control law, to benefit from the advantages of both methods. To systematically deal with system uncertainties, an adaptive law is used to update the gain of nonsingular terminal sliding mode control. The advantage of this approach over the existing methods is that it not only can robustly and stably control an uncertain nonlinear system against external disturbances but also can optimally solve a quadratic cost function (e.g. minimization of control effort). The Lyapunov stability theory has been applied to verify the stability of the proposed approach. Moreover, to show the superiority of this method, the computer simulation results of the proposed method have been compared with those of an adaptive sliding mode control scheme. This comparison shows that the presented approach is capable of optimizing the control inputs while achieving the stability of the examined two-flexible-link manipulator in the presence of model uncertainties and external disturbances.