Conventional robot manipulators actuated by motors with the speed reducer such as the harmonic drive have weakness in the load capacity, since the speed reducer does not have enough strength. To improve this, a new type of robot actuator based on the four-bar-link mechanism driven by the ball screw was constructed. Also, a new type of revolute robot manipulator composed of the developed actuators was developed. But, modelling errors occur due to the off-set from the nominal model since the exact modeling of the complex inertia variation of the four-bar-link actuator is very difficult. To control the proposed robot along the prescribed trajectory, a sliding mode control algorithm was applied with compensation function for the modeling errors. To show performance of the proposed controller, a computer simulation was performed, and its results was presented.
