Obstacle Avoidance Control of Multi-Degree-of-Freedom Manipulator Using Electrostatic Potential Field and Sliding Mode

The approach presented in this paper is based on two ideas : (1) on the planning level an electrostatic potential field in the configuration space of the robot-manipulator is used. The generalized force curves are attractive to the goal point avoiding obstacles without local minima ; (2) on the control level the system follows these force curves using sliding mode control. The system is attracted to the swishing manifold using sliding mode and therefore the system is robust to disturbances and parameter variations.