Stabilization of a Class of Nonlinear Underactuated Robotic Systems through Nonsingular Fast Terminal Sliding Mode Control

To facilitate the stabilization of nonlinear underactuated robotic systems under perturbation, a novel nonsingular fast terminal sliding mode control method is proposed. Based on the system transformation into an integrator chain, the combination of twisting-like algorithm and a nonsingular fast terminal sliding mode control technique is employed to achieve the stabilization of the studied systems, which can drive the robot states (joint positions and velocities) to the desired region and then maintain the system at the equilibrium point in finite time. The robustness of the proposed method is validated by the Lyapunov direct method. Finally, numerical simulation results further demonstrate that the proposed method has better performance on the convergent speed of the system state (robot joint positions and velocities) than state-of-the-art methods, especially for the underactuated joints.