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This paper addresses an adaptive fault-tolerant tracking control for robot manipulators. By fully considering the effects of uncertainties and actuator effectiveness faults (UAEFs), a robust fault-tolerant tracking control combining with an auxiliary function and an integral sliding manifold is first developed for uncertain robot manipulators. Then, an adaptive law for unknown parameters of the upper bounded uncertainties is constructed to obtain a robust fault-tolerant approach with the elimination of the reaching phase of sliding mode control (SMC). The stability of the proposed approaches is accomplished by Lyapunov stable theory. The key contributions of the proposed approach are as follows: i) the reaching phase of SMC is removed in the control design and then the sliding mode starts at very beginning; (ii) the nominal control term is eliminated in the design of integral sliding surface and then the algebraic loop problem is also avoided in the proposed approach for robot manipulators; (iii) the simple control structure with an adaptive law is obtained for improving chattering-restraining ability of the proposed approach and then the effects of time delay and computational burden are also restrained from the proposed approach. Simulation and experimental comparisons have been accomplished for verifying the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

The temperature-sensitive point is the input variable of the thermal error compensation model of computer numerical control (CNC) machine tools. At present, the most commonly used selection method is to measure the multipoint temperature and thermal error of the machine tool synchronously and select several temperature measurement points with the highest thermal error correlation as temperature-sensitive points according to the measurement data. This study reveals that this method sometimes has obvious mis-selection and causes the model to fail. The reason is that the weak correlation temperature measurement point away from the machine tool heat source amplifies the volatility of the correlation evaluation result, owing to the small overall change. If the calculated result exceeds the true strong correlation temperature measurement point, it will be incorrectly selected as the temperature-sensitive point. This scenario has been termed herein as the pseudocorrelation problem. With the gradual popularization of thermal error compensation technology for CNC machine tools, pseudocorrelation will seriously affect the mass production pass rate. Therefore, the study analyzes and rigorously proves the mathematical mechanism of this problem, and the temperature measurement point preselection algorithm based on the correlation coefficient volatility determination factor (CCVDF) is proposed to eliminate potential pseudocorrelation temperature points before selecting temperature-sensitive points. After 1000 random simulation experiments, the failure rate of Z-direction thermal error modeling after preselection decreased from 5.1% to 0.5%, and the Y-direction error decreased from 33.7% to 1.5%. This algorithm can greatly improve the qualification rate of large-scale equipment of thermal error compensation technology. INDEX TERMS CNC machine tool, thermal error modeling, temperature-sensitive point, correlation, mathematical mechanism.

Dielectric elastomer is a prosperous material in electromechanical systems because it can effectively transform electrical energy to mechanical work. In this paper, the period and periodic solution for a spherical dielectric elastomer balloon subjected to static pressure and voltage are derived through an analytical method, called the Newton-harmonic balance (NHB) method. The elastomeric spherical balloon is modeled as an autonomous nonlinear differential equation with general and negatively powered nonlinearities. The NHB method enables to linearize the governing equation prior to applying the harmonic balance method. Even for such a nonlinear system with negatively powered variable and non-classical non-odd nonlinearity, the NHB method is capable of deriving highly accurate approximate solutions. Several practical examples with different initial stretch ratios are solved to illustrate the dynamic inflation of elastomeric spherical balloons. When the initial amplitude is sufficiently large, the system will lose its stability. Comparison with Runge-Kutta numerical integration solutions is also presented and excellent agreement has been observed.