Adaptive sliding mode control of robot manipulators with general sliding manifold

Based on a general form for a sliding manifold, two design strategies for adaptive sliding mode control are presented for nonlinear robot manipulator systems. It is shown that, without any prior knowledge of the manipulator parameters under the deterioration of a class of state-dependent input disturbances, the controllers guarantee the occurrence of the sliding mode on the general sliding manifold, which can be a nonlinear or time-varying manifold. In the sliding mode, the desired performance can be obtained by selecting a suitable sliding manifold, which is illustrated, for example, by a nonlinear manifold.