Copyright © 2012 Jung Hua Yang and Kuang Shine Yang. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Mechanical arms have been widely used in the industry for many decades. They have played a dominant role in factory automation. However the control performance, or even system stability, would be deteriorated if some of the actuators fail during the operations. Hence, in this study, an adaptive variable structure scheme is presented to solve this problem. It is shown that, by applying the control mechanism proposed in this paper, the motion of robot systems can maintain asymptotical stability in case of actuators failure. The control algorithms as well as the convergence analysis are theoretically proved based on Lyapunov theory. In addition, to demonstrate the validity of the controller, a number of simulations as well as real-time experiments are also performed for Pendubot robot and Furuta robot systems. The results confirm the applicability of the proposed controller.