Abstract This paper focuses on developing a robust control strategy for robotic manipulators, which are widely used in industrial and automation systems due to their flexibility and precision. However, their performance is often affected by factors such as unmodelled dynamics, friction and external perturbations, making accurate trajectory tracking a challenging task. To address these issues, an enhanced active disturbance rejection control (EADRC) scheme is proposed. The method employs an extended state observer (ESO) based on the system dynamics to estimate and compensate for internal uncertainties and external disturbances in real time. To boost the tracking accuracy, a nonlinear feedback control scheme is formulated. To further refine its performance, key controller parameters are tuned using an enhanced particle swarm optimisation (PSO) method, which incorporates elements of chaos theory to improve global search capability and convergence behaviour. The proposed EADRC method is evaluated through comparison with conventional controllers, and the results demonstrate its superior tracking accuracy and robustness.
Rauf et al. (Mon,) studied this question.