Adaptive Higher Order Sliding Mode

Control for Robotic Manipulators

with Matched and Mismatched
Uncertainties

Ahmad Taher Azar1(B) , Fernando E. Serrano2 ,

Sundarapandian Vaidyanathan3 , and Hani Albalawi4
1
Faculty of Computers and Information, Benha University, Benha, Egypt
ahmad t azar@ieee.org
2
Universidad Tecnologica Centroamericana (UNITEC), Zona Jacaleapa,
Tegucigalpa, Honduras
serranofer@eclipso.eu
3
Research and Development Centre, Vel Tech University, Avadi,
Chennai 600 062, Tamil Nadu, India
sundarvtu@gmail.com
4
Electrical Engineering Department, University of Tabuk, Tabuk, Saudi Arabia
halbala@ut.edu.sa

Abstract. Robotic manipulators have been extensively used in indus-

trial and other kinds of applications. Thus, it is important to design
effective control strategies for tracking precision for robotic manipula-
tors. In this work, an adaptive higher order sliding mode control for a
robotic manipulator with matched and mismatched uncertainties is pro-
posed. Matched uncertainties occur when they are found in the input of
the system and mismatched uncertainties are found in the system param-
eters. Hence, an adaptive higher order sliding mode controller is designed
when both matched and mismatched uncertainties are found. Consider-
ing that uncertainties yield unwanted effects in the controller design, slid-
ing mode control provides a suitable control strategy for robotic manip-
ulators when extreme tracking precision of the end effector is needed
especially in a reduced task space. The design procedure starts with the
dynamic model represented in the Euler-Lagrange form considering the
uncertainties of the system and then by implementing a Lyapunov stabil-
ity method and selecting an appropriate sliding surface suitable control.
Finally, adaptive laws are obtained taking into account the matched and
mismatched uncertainties in the system model. As a numerical exam-
ple, the proposed control strategy is validated for trajectory tracking
purposes of a five bar linkage mechanism.

Keywords: Robotics · Sliding mode control · Uncertainties ·

Adaptive control · Mechatronics

c Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

A. E. Hassanien et al. (Eds.): AMLTA 2019, AISC 921, pp. 360–369, 2020.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14118-9_36
 Higher Order Sliding Mode for Robotic Manipulators 361

1 Introduction
Robotic manipulators have been extensively used in different kinds of applica-
tions such as industrial, aerospace and medical applications. Hence, the con-
trols for trajectory tracking of these mechanisms have needed a lot of effort of
robotic and automatic control specialists since several decades ago. The preci-
sion of an efficient automatic control system is necessary to drive the end effector
of a robotic manipulator on the way of a pre-specified trajectory for different
tasks such as welding, painting and screwing among other activities. In the last
decade some approaches involving strategies such as passivity based backstep-
ping and sliding mode control have been implemented to improve the accuracy
of the trajectory tracking of different mechanisms (Mondal and Mahanta 2011;
Mobayen and Tchier 2018; Azar and Zhu 2015; Azar and Vaidyanathan 2015,
2016, 2018; Azar et al. 2018a,b). In this work, an adaptive higher order sliding
mode controller is proposed for robotic manipulators with matched and mis-
matched uncertainties.
Matched uncertainties are those kind of uncertainties found in the input of
a system while mismatched uncertainties are those that are found in the sys-
tem parameters. For this reason, we consider both matched and mismatched
uncertainties in order to design the adaptive higher order sliding mode provid-
ing a novel contribution in which a robust approach (Azar and Serrano 2017) is
needed to reduce to zero the tracking error of the system for different kinds of
robotic manipulators and mechanisms (Gutierrez et al. 2018). We note that the
higher order sliding mode have been implemented in different kinds of complex
systems. The higher order sliding mode technique consists in designing a sliding
surface and then finding a control law that makes the r − 1 higher order deriva-
tives to approach zero where r is the sliding mode order. For this purpose, it is
sometimes necessary to implement a super-twisting algorithm in order that the
sliding variable and its r derivatives approach zero. Some examples of adaptive
higher order sliding mode control can be found in (Han and Liu 2016a; Barth
et al. 2018; Thomas et al. 2018). Besides, some applications of higher order slid-
ing mode control in fields different from mechatronics and robotics are found in
(Han and Liu 2016b) where this control strategy is implemented for trajectory
tracking of an air cushion vehicle. Another example can be found in (Tiwari et al.
2016) where this sliding mode approach is designed for the attitude control of
a rigid aircraft. Finally in (Tannuri and Agostinho 2010), a higher order sliding
mode controller is implemented in the dynamic position system of an offshore
vessel. In (Mondal and Mahanta 2013; Khan et al. 2011; Mohamed et al. 2018),
some chattering reduction sliding mode strategies for multi-input multi-output
MIMO systems and single-input single-output SISO systems are shown consid-
ering the matched and mismatched uncertainties. One of the most important
conditions that are considered in this study for both kinds of uncertainties are
the norm bounded characteristics of them and so it is important to establish
some conditions as they appear in some studies such as (Köroĝlu and Scherer
2005; Battilotti 1996; Adrot et al. 2004).
362 A. T. Azar et al.

In this work, an adaptive higher order sliding mode controller is designed

for robotic manipulators with matched and mismatched uncertainties. The con-
troller design is done by implementing a super-twisting algorithm in order to
obtain the control law and then the adaptive laws are obtained by a Lyapunov
stability approach. It is important to consider that some conditions are taken
into account for the matched and mismatched uncertainties, conditions that in
this case is by assuming decreasing uncertainties, so in this way the conditions
that the norm of the matched and mismatched uncertainties are upper bounded
is overcame. Finally, the theoretical results obtained in this study are validated
by a numerical experiment in which a five-bar linkage mechanism is used as an
example and then the results obtained in this experiment are compared with the
results obtained by (Zhao et al. 2018; Mujumdar et al. 2014).

2 Problem Formulation
Consider the following dynamical model of a robotic manipulator in an Euler-
Lagrange form:

D(q(t))q̈(t) + C(q(t), q̇(t))q̇(t) + g(q(t)) = τ (t) (1)

where q(t) ∈ Rn is the position vector, τ (t) ∈ Rn is the torque vector, D(q(t)) ∈
Rn×n is the inertia matrix, C(q(t), q̇(t)) ∈ Rn×n is the Coriolis matrix and
g(q(t)) ∈ Rn is the gravity vector. By making the following change of variables
x1 (t) = q(t), x2 (t) = q̇(t) and X(t) = [xT1 (t), xT2 (t)]T , the following uncertain
system is obtained:

Ẋ(t) = F (X(t)) + G(X(t))[U + Ξ(X, t)] + P (X, t) (2)

where
 
x2 (t)
F (X(t)) =
−D−1 (x1 (t))C(x1 (t), x2 (t))x2 (t) − D−1 (x1 (t))g(x1 (t))
 
0 0
G(X(t)) = n×n −1n×n
0n×n D (x1 (t))
 
0
U= n (3)
τ

and Ξ(X, t), P (X, t) are the matched and mismatched uncertainties that are
defined in Sect. 3. The control and adaptive laws of the system are obtained in
Sect. 3 by considering some suitable conditions to overcome these issues.

3 Adaptive Higher Order Controller Design

In this section, an adaptive higher order controller for robotic manipulators
is obtained by considering the matched and mismatched uncertainties in the
input and system parameters respectively. It is important to note that these
 Higher Order Sliding Mode for Robotic Manipulators 363

kinds of disturbance have not been studied well in the past for the design of
sliding mode controllers for robotic manipulators. As explained before, due to
the necessity of accuracy in trajectory tracking is important to take into account
some issues related to input uncertainties and unmodeled dynamics that are not
considered in previous studies. In this section, the control law is obtained by
a super-twisting algorithm selecting an appropriate control law and then the
adaptive gains are obtained by a Lyapunov stability approach dealing with the
matched and mismatched system uncertainties. Before deriving the control and
adaptive laws, we consider the following definition related to the matched and
mismatched uncertainties.
Definition 1. The uncertainties Ξ(X, t) and P (X, t) are class L functions, i.e.
they are decreasing functions for which their norms meet the following conditions
limt→∞ Ξ(X, t) = 0 and limt→∞ P (X, t) = 0. 

Before deriving the higher order sliding mode control, the error dynamics of
the system and its derivative are given by the following equations:
e(t) = X(t) − Xd (t)
ė(t) = Ẋ(t) − Ẋd (t) (4)
where Xd (t) is the desired trajectory vector of the robotic manipulator.
The higher order sliding mode controller is obtained by using the super-
twisting algorithm (Zhao et al. 2018; Mujumdar et al. 2014) as follows:
Ṡ(t) = −K1 S(t)1/2 sign(S(t)) + Z(t)
Ż(t) = −K2 sign(S(t)) (5)
where K1 , K2 ∈ R are the sliding mode gains that will be adjusted by the
adaptive algorithm.
The sliding variable S(t) and its derivative Ṡ(t) are given by the following
equations:
S(t) = Ke(t)
Ṡ(t) = K ė(t) (6)
where K ∈ R2n×2n is the sliding variable gain matrix.
The error dynamics shown in (4) is defined as:
ė(t) = F (X(t)) + G(X(t))[U + Ξ(X, t)] + P (X, t) − Ẋd (t) (7)
Substituting (7) in (6) and then in (5), the following sliding mode control law is
obtained:
U = −G−1 (X(t))F (X(t)) + G−1 (X(t))Ẋd (t)
(8)
−G−1 (X(t))K −1 K1 S1/2 sign(S(t))
Substituting (8) in (7), the following sliding mode dynamics is obtained:
ė(t) = −K −1 K1 S(t)1/2 sign(S(t)) + G(X(t))Ξ(X, t) + P (X, t)
Ż(t) = −K2 sign(S(t)) (9)
364 A. T. Azar et al.

The following theorem is needed to find the adaptive laws for the adjustable gains
K1 and K2 by selecting an appropriate Lyapunov functional and implementing
the control law shown in (8).

Theorem 1. The uncertain system shown in (1) is stabilized by the super-

twisting sliding mode control law (8) and the following adaptive laws:
1 T
K̇1 (t) = e (t)K −1 S(t)1/2 sign(S(t))
α
1
K̇2 (t) = Z T (t)sign(S(t)) (10)
β
Proof 1. Consider the following Lyapunov function:
1 T 1 β α
V (e, Z, K1 , K2 ) = e (t)e(t) + Z T (t)Z(t) + K22 (t) + K12 (11)
2 2 2 2
where α, β ∈ R+ are constants selected by the designer.
By finding the derivative of the Lyapunov function (11), the following result
is obtained:

V̇ (e, Z, K1 , K2 ) = eT (t)ė(t) + Z T (t)Ż(t) + βK2 (t)K̇2 (t) + αK1 (t)K̇1 (t) (12)

Using (9), we obtain

V̇ (e, Z, K1 , K2 ) = −eT (t)K −1 K1 (t)S(t)1/2 sign(S(t)) + eT (t)G(X(t))Ξ(X, t)

+eT (t)P (X, t) − Z T (t)K2 (t) sign(S(t)) + βK2 (t)K̇2 (t)
+αK1 (t)K̇1 (13)

Thus, we select the adaptive laws as follows:

1 T
K̇1 (t) = e (t)K −1 S(t)1/2 sign(S(t))
α
1
K̇2 (t) = Z T (t) sign(S(t)) (14)
β
By substituting (14) in (13), we obtain

V̇ (e, Z, K1 , K2 ) = eT (t)G(X, t)Ξ(X, t) + eT (t)P (X, t) (15)

Now taking the norm of (15) and by implementing Definition 1, the following
conclusion is obtained

V̇ (e, Z, K1 , K2 ) ≤ eT (t)G(X(t))Ξ(X, t) + eT (t)P (X, t) ≤ 0 (16)

This completes the proof. 



Theorem 1 ensures that the closed-loop system drives the error variables e(t)
to zero while adjusting the respective parameters K1 and K2 implementing the
control law obtained by the super-twisting algorithm shown in (8).
 Higher Order Sliding Mode for Robotic Manipulators 365

4 Numerical Experiment and Discussion

In this numerical example, the control strategy described in Sect. 3 is validated
for trajectory tracking purposes of a five bar linkage mechanism (Spong et al.
2006). The parameters of this mechanism are m1 = m2 = m3 = m4 = 0.5 Kgs,
l1 = l3 = 0.4 m, l2 = l4 = 0.8 m, lc1 = lc3 = 0.2 m, lc2 = lc4 = 0.4 m, I1 =
I3 = 0.3 kg.m2 , I2 = I4 = 0.4 kg.m2 and g = 9.81 m/s2 while the mechanism
is depicted in Fig. 1. The inertia matrix and the gravity vector components are
shown below (Spong et al. 2006):
2 2
d11 (q(t)) = m1 lc1 + m3 lc3 + m4 l12 + I1 + I3
d12 (q(t)) = d21 (q(t)) = (m3 l2 lc3 − m4 l1 lc4 )cos(q2 (t) − q1 (t))
2
d22 (q(t)) = m2 lc2 + m3 l22 + m4 lc4
2
+ I2 + I4 (17)

g1 (q(t)) = gcos(q1 (t))(m1 lc1 + m3 lc3 + m4 l1 )

g2 (q(t)) = gcos(q2 (t))(m2 lc2 + m3 l2 − m4 lc4 ) (18)

It is important to note that the Coriolis matrix is zero for this experiment.
The matched and mismatched uncertainties used in this experiment are given
as follows:

Ξ(X, t) = 0.1e−10t X(t)

P (X, t) = 0.1e−5t X(t) (19)

The controller parameters are α = β = 0.5 and the gain matrix K is given below:
⎡ ⎤
10000 0 0 0
⎢ 0 10000 0 0 ⎥
K=⎢ ⎣ 0
⎥ (20)
0 10000 0 ⎦
0 0 0 10000

The system initial conditions are X(0) = [0, 0, 0, 0]T . The reference variables
Xd (t) are shown below.
 
0.1sin(t)
xd1 (t) =
0.1sin(t)
xd2 (t) = ẋd1 (t) (21)

In Fig. 2, the trajectory of the variable X11 is shown. It is noticed that the trajec-
tory is tracked accurately by the action of the proposed control strategy in com-
parison with the strategies shown in (Mujumdar et al. 2014; Zhao et al. 2018).
366 A. T. Azar et al.

Fig. 1. Five bar linkage mechanism

Fig. 2. Variable x11 trajectory

It can be also noticed in Fig. 3 that the error for the variable e1 approaches zero. In
Fig. 4, the input variable τ1 is shown where it can be noticed that the control effort
yielded by the action of the proposed controller is smaller than the control effort
yielded by the approaches shown in (Mujumdar et al. 2014; Zhao et al. 2018).
The theoretical results obtained in this study prove that even when matched
and mismatched uncertainties are found in robotic manipulators or another kind
of mechanism, this issue can be overcome by an effective adaptive higher order
sliding mode controller. It is important to notice that the chattering effect is
reduced to zero by the proposed strategy and this is achieved by the adaptive
gains that make the sliding variables to reach the desired value.
 Higher Order Sliding Mode for Robotic Manipulators 367

Fig. 3. Error variable e1

Fig. 4. Input variable τ1

5 Conclusion and Future Work

In this paper, a higher order sliding mode controller for robotic manipulators and
mechanisms is proposed. A novel feature of our work is that the matched and
mismatched uncertainties are considered when they are found in the input and
the system parameters respectively. To solve these problems, some conditions for
these uncertainties were considered, and by using a Lyapunov stability approach
and implementing a super-twisting algorithm. In the future, this research study
will guide to design and analyze different kinds of sliding mode controllers that
deal with other kinds of uncertainties.
368 A. T. Azar et al.

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