A Comparative Study of Optimal First and Higher Order Sliding Mode Control for a Robot Manipulator

This paper presents a comparative study of Higher Order Sliding Mode (HOSM) Control and first order Sliding Mode which is simply known as Sliding Mode Control (SMC). This comparative study capacitates one to observe performance qualities of both controllers. First, the procedures of designing of both techniques are presented. After that for a better comparison, both control approaches are optimized using Particle Swarm Optimization. Finally, simulation results will be showed for the nominal model of a robot manipulator which reveal the merits and demerits of both methods. A desired path is defined as a tracking task. Although simulation results show an overall improvement for HOSM over SMC, the latter still displays some good points over the former.