Experimental Study of the Tracking Control of a SMA Actuated Manipulator

Shape memory alloy (SMA) composites have many applications as actuators because of excellent power to weight ratio, smooth and silent actuation. SMA actuators exhibit severe hysteresis and system nonlinearities those are often responsible for position inaccuracy in a regulation or tracking system. In this paper, three different kind of linear, nonlinear and robust nonlinear controllers have been applied for tracking control of a SMA actuated manipulator system. A small-scaled one-dof SMA actuated manipulator is recalled from our previous work [1] for experiments. At the end experimental results from real time control are presented to show the performance of individual controller as well as to compare the effectiveness of the controllers in tracking both stationary and periodically varied input signals.