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Abstract In this paper, a disturbance observer‐based adaptive neural backstepping integral sliding mode control (BISMC) is developed for a flexible joint robot (FJR) with the integration of an adjustable stiffness rotary actuator (ASRA). This system suffers from unknown system dynamics, external disturbance, and the influence of variable stiffness, which is a challenge for achieving precision tracking performance. Considering the lumped disturbances in FJR generated by the hydraulic system and the stiffness modulation of the ASRA, we investigate the structural dynamics nonlinear model of the FJR system, including hydraulic actuator dynamics. While other linear control strategies are applied for the FJR, the proposed controller uses BISMC, neural networks (NN), and nonlinear disturbance observers to deal with the disadvantages mentioned above. Radial basis function neural networks (RBFNN) are designed to tackle unknown nonlinear functions, and the disturbance observers are introduced to compensate for the influence of the variable stiffness, disturbance, and the approximation error caused by NN. Simulations and experiments are independently implemented to demonstrate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed controller. Results exhibit that the integral absolute error‐index is reduced by 20.4% when the proposed method is deployed for the experiment with a multistep trajectory.
Phan et al. (Wed,) studied this question.