Fractional Order Controller Design for A Flexible Link Manipulator Robot

In this paper a novel controller for a flexible link manipulator based on fractional calculus is proposed. A hybrid system that combines the advantages in terms of robustness of the fractional control and the sliding mode control is proposed. Due to adding the extra degree of freedom, the fractional order sliding mode controller can achieve better control performance than the integer order sliding mode controller. For the problem of determining the design parameters, the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is used. The proposed controller is applied for a single‐link flexible manipulator robot. Finally, the performance and the significance of the closed loop system are investigated. The simulation results signify the performance of the proposed controller.