Walking position commanded NAO robot using nonlinear disturbance observer-based fixed-time terminal sliding mode

The walking stability of a humanoid robot is a fundamental problem due to the complex nonlinear dynamic model of the robot’s legs. This work introduces the performance tracking control for the humanoid NAO robot by using a Nonlinear Disturbance Observer (NDO)-based Fixed-time Terminal Sliding Mode (FTSM). The influence of uncertain external disturbance is considered while implementing the control strategy to improve the walking motion of the NAO robot. An NDO is adapted to estimate the uncertainties and external disturbances. A novel FTSM surface is proposed to drive the tracking errors to zero in fixed-time. The designed NDO-based FTSM control law achieves robustness while reducing the chattering phenomenon. The Lyapunov’s stability theory is used to establish the fixed-time stability of the sliding surface and system states under the proposed control method. To validate the performance of the proposed NDO-based FTSM control, a real-time experiment was conducted on a humanoid NAO robot to demonstrate the improved tracking performance in the presence of the uncertain perturbation effect. The effectiveness of the proposed controller design is validated on a flat, upward inclined surface, and compared to another controller.