Real-time networked control of an industrial robot manipulator via discrete-time second order sliding modes

This article presents the networked control of a robotic anthropomorphic manipulator based on a second-order
sliding mode technique, where the control objective is to track a desired trajectory for the manipulator. The
adopted control scheme allows an easy and effective distribution of the control algorithm over two networked
machines. While the predictability of real-time tasks execution is achieved by the Soft Hard Real-Time Kernel
(S.Ha.R.K.) real-time operating system, the communication is established via a standard Ethernet network.
The performances of the control system are evaluated under different experimental system configurations using,
to perform the experiments, a COMAU SMART3-S2 industrial robot, and the results are analysed to put into
evidence the robustness of the proposed approach against possible network delays, packet losses and unmodelled
effects.