Controlling an industrial robot is mainly a problem of dynamics. It includes nonlinearities, uncertainties and external perturbations, which should be considered in the design of control laws. In this paper, a variable structure control method with a mathematical tool is proposed and applied to nonlinear systems to solve the trajectory tracking problem for rigid robot manipulators. The aim is to implement a methodology to control errors in a controller that is robust to uncertainties in the model of the system. Variable structure theory provides the technique for the design of such a controller. The design steps are presented, first from a theoretical perspective and then applied to the control of a two degree-of-freedom manipulator. Simulation results that backed the implementation are presented followed by the experiments conducted, and then the results are presented. The conclusion is that the proposed mathematical tool with variable structure control is readily applicable to industrial robots for the robust control of positions.
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