Disturbance observer-based fractional-order sliding mode control for free-floating space manipulator with disturbance

This paper proposes a fractional-order sliding mode control scheme based on disturbance observer for tracking control of free-floating space manipulators (FFSM), regarding system uncertainties and disturbances. To mitigate the effect of disturbance, a fast fractional-order disturbance observer (FFODOB) is proposed, which can estimate the disturbances in finite time. It relaxes the assumption of first order differentiable of the disturbances, which is common in many existing disturbance observers, to continuous but not necessarily differentiable, making it more suitable for practical applications. Besides, a new fractional-order nonsingular terminal sliding mode (FONTSM) controller is designed, in which, a fractional-order integral term is introduced into the conventional nonsingular terminal sliding mode surface. The presented FONTSM improves the transient response and tracking precision of FFSM. Stability of the closed-loop system and finite-time convergence are proved theoretically. Simulations are performed for different situations, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiorities of the proposed methods over the existing methods.(c) 2022 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.