Abstract
This paper presents a nonlinear controller for electric power assist systems based on the sliding mode control. The proposed sliding mode controller is designed to achieve desired nonlinear properties including gravitational effect with robustness against disturbances such as friction force and modeling errors. Furthermore, so-called reaching phase is positively utilized so that the operator can feel disturbance torque of relatively large amplitude which should be noticed as information about environment, for example, when hitting an obstacle accidentally. Since the reaching phase should be designed from several points of view, the dynamics in the reaching phase is linearlized in order to use fruitful linear control theories such as H-∞ theory.
