Considering that in the trajectory tracking control of a nonlinear robotic manipulator system, the control effect is easily limited by the initial state of the system, and the system has modeling error, unknown disturbance, and friction in the actual control, to overcome the above problems, a fixed-time sliding mode control (SMC) strategy based on adaptive disturbance observer (ADO) is developed in this paper. Firstly, feedforward compensation of the system is achieved by developing an ADO to accurately estimate the compound disturbances in the system. Second, a new fixed-time sliding mode (SM) surface is presented to overcome the singularity issue and accelerate the error convergence. In addition, to enhance the performance of the reaching phase, a variable exponential power reaching law (VEPRL) is developed, which can effectively adjust the convergence rate. Through rigorous theoretical analysis, it is shown that the system state can be stabilized at a fixed time, and an upper bound on the convergence time is also given. Finally, the effectiveness of the control method is verified by comparing it with different control schemes in simulation.
K E Y W O R D Sadaptive disturbance observer (ADO), fixed time, robotic manipulator system, sliding mode (SM) surface, variable exponential power reaching law (VEPRL)