Abstract
This work takes advantage of synergetic control theory and fractional calculus to develop and propose fractional synergetic control (FSC) strategy for Four Degrees of Freedom (4-DOF) robot manipulator. The proposed fractional synergetic control is designed to track a joint space as well as workspace desired trajectories. Fractional calculus gives more flexibility in the design since it has a wider stability region. Added to that, as stated in the literature, compared to a similar approach such as sliding mode control, the synergetic control approach converges faster to the equilibrium point, without chattering with a fast response. This paper proposes a new control strategy that takes advantage of fractional calculus and synergetic control theory. This proposed control strategy is tested experimentally on a 4-DOF manipulator to study the performance of the proposed control scheme. The stability of the closed-loop system is proved using the Lyapunov approach. The experimental results have shown that the proposed FSC design has achieved a good tracking performance.