Admittance-Based Non-Singular Terminal Sliding Mode Control of Multiple Cooperative Manipulators

Abstract

This paper introduces a novel decentralized control framework that integrates admittance control, non-singular terminal sliding mode (NTSM) control, and load distribution to cooperatively manipulate a single object with multiple robotic manipulators. Admittance control grants the system a level of compliance for safe human-robot physical interaction. The admittance controller maintains all communication between the manipulators. The NTSM controller provides accurate tracking of the manipulators in the presence of disturbances and dynamic model uncertainties. A decentralized load distribution method is designed to minimize the internal forces on the object. The proposed framework is applied to numerical simulations of a team of three 3-DOF robotic manipulators to demonstrate its effectiveness in cooperative manipulation tasks.