Sliding Mode Control for 2 Degrees of Freedom Upper Limb Rehabilitation Robotic System under Uncertainties

Abstract

Rehabilitation of patients suffering from post-stroke injuries via robots is now adapted word widely. The aim of this therapy is to restore and improve the dysfunction and the performance of the affected limbs doing repetitive tasks with the help of rehabilitation robots, as robots are best way to perform repetitive task without any monotony failure. Control of these rehabilitation robots is an important part to consider because of nonlinearity and uncertainty of the system. This paper presents nonlinear sliding mode controller (SMC) for controlling a 2 degrees of freedom (DOF) upper limb robotic manipulator. Sliding mode control is able to handle system uncertainties and parametric changes. One drawback of using SMC is high frequency oscillations called as chattering. This chattering can be reduced by using boundary layer technique. Experiments have been carried out under perturbed conditions and results have shown that SMC performs well and remain stable and thus proves to robust controller for upper limb robotic manipulator.