Backstepping control of flexible joint manipulator based on hyperbolic tangent function with control input and rate constraints

In this paper, we investigate the trajectory tracking problems of the link angle and angle speed of the flexible joint manipulator model based on external disturbance, the control input and rate constraints. The controller of the flexible joint manipulator model is designed using the backstepping control scheme. To achieve this objective, the smooth hyperbolic tangent function is used to solve the problems of control input and rate constraints, and the stability is proved using Lyapunov function in the design procedure of the backstepping control scheme. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed backstepping controller is verified by numerical simulation.