Edinburgh Napier University

  Fabricated by superelastic materials, soft actuators are an emerging field to provide a solution of safe interaction with complicated, unstructured and frequently brittle work environments, while they also bear challenges in fragility and controlling of continuous deformation bodies. This paper addresses an adaptive sliding mode controller with input saturation constraints for soft actuators with unavailable system states and uncertainties. First, an improved super-twisting observer is employed to estimate system states and compensate system uncertainties adaptively. Second, an integral sliding mode controller is proposed to track desired references, strengthen system robustness and constrain input bounds. Finally, the proposed controller is utilized and compared with previous works in simulations to illustrate the effectiveness.