A New Practical Robust Adaptive Control of Cable-driven Robots

In this work, a new practical robust adaptive control is proposed for cable-driven robots. The proposed control method consists of three components, which are the newly designed adaptive nonsingular fast terminal sliding mode (ANFTSM) surface and time-delay estimation (TDE) and fast terminal sliding mode (FTSM) reaching law. The TDE is utilized to estimate the lumped system dynamics in a simple way, and then a practical model-free control structure is established. The proposed ANFTSM surface and FTSM reaching law are utilized to further enhance the control performance in both sliding mode and reaching phases. Benefiting from TDE, the proposed control is model-free and easy to apply in practical applications. Due to our ANFTSM surface and FTSM reaching law, the proposed control is highly accurate and fast convergent. The validity of our control is demonstrated through three comparative experiments using a developed cable-driven robot named Polaris-I.