Optimized Nonlinear Sliding Mode Control of a Continuum Robot Manipulator

The so-called continuum robots have become unprecedentedly omnipresent in various fields because of their flexibility and dexterity. They can dexterously adapt to almost any trajectory in their accessible workspace. On the other hand, continuum robots have infinite degrees of freedom, which makes their modeling and controlling challenging, complex and difficult task. To this end, in this paper, an optimized nonlinear sliding mode control algorithm is developed for the sake of controlling the continuum robot’s end effector. To achieve satisfactory performance, an adequate nonlinear sliding mode surface is purposefully used. Then, the controller parameters are optimized using the adaptive particle swarm optimization algorithm. The performance of the proposed controller is assessed by considering two trajectories. Furthermore, the performance of the optimized proportional integral derivative controller is compared with the optimized sliding mode control scheme. Finally, the simulation results demonstrate that the proposed controller provides better performance in terms of settling time, overshoot and robustness against several disturbances than the other considered controllers.