Sliding mode control of a newly designed cable-driven manipulator with time delay estimation

To ensure satisfactory control performance for the newly designed cable-driven manipulator with complex unknown lumped disturbance, a sliding mode control (SMC) method based on time delay estimation (TDE) is proposed and investigated in this paper. The proposed method mainly has two elements, the TDE element used to properly estimate and compensate the lumped unknown dynamics of the system, and the SMC element used to ensure satisfactory control performance under complex disturbance. The proposed method is model-free and easy to use in practical applications thanks to TDE, and has good robustness benefiting from SMC. Corresponding stability of the closed-loop control system is analyzed using Lyapunov stability theory. Finally, the effectiveness of our proposed control method was demonstrated by some experiments.