Optimization of cubic polynomial joint trajectories and sliding mode controllers for robots using evolution strategy

This paper presents a minimum-time trajectory planning method and a tracking control scheme for robot manipulators. In the first step, we find the minimum-time trajectories by optimizing cubic polynomial joint trajectories using the evolution strategy. In the second step, by the use of the evolution strategy we tune the sliding mode controller parameters for the robot manipulator to track precisely the trajectories that were found in the previous step. Experimental results show that the proposed method is very useful.