Journal of Advanced Science and Engineering Research 1 (2011) 1-22 Novel Sliding Mode Controller for Robot Manipulator using FPGA Farzin Piltan, Atefeh Gavahian, Nasri Sulaiman and M.H. Marhaban Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Malaysia. SSP.ROBOTIC@yahoo.com Article Info Received: 25 th July 2011 Accepted: 10 th August 2011 Published online: 10 th September 2011 © 2011 Design for Scientific Renaissance All rights reserved ABSTRACT One of the most active research areas in the field of robotics is robot manipulators control, because these systems are multi-input multi-output (MIMO), nonlinear, and uncertainty. At present, robot manipulators is used in unknown and unstructured situation and caused to provide complicated systems, consequently strong mathematical tools are used in new control methodologies to design nonlinear robust controller(s) with satisfactory performance (e.g., minimum error, good trajectory, (and) disturbance rejection). Robotic systems controlling is vital due to the wide range of application(s). Obviously, stability and robustness are the most minimum requirements in control systems; even though the proof of stability and robustness is more important especially in the case of nonlinear systems. One of the best nonlinear robust controllers which can be used in uncertainty nonlinear systems is sliding mode controller (SMC). Chattering phenomenon is the most important challenge in this controller. Most of nonlinear controllers need real time mobility operation; one of the most important devices which can be used to solve this challenge is Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). FPGA can be used to design a controller in a single chip Integrated Circuit (IC). In this research the SMC is designed using VHDL language for implementation on FPGA device (XA3S1600E-Spartan-3E), with minimum chattering and high processing speed (63.29 MHz). Keywords: robot manipulator, sliding mode controller, chattering phenomenon, FPGA, VHDL language. 1. Introduction A robot is a machine which can be programmed as a reality of tasks which it has divided into three main categories i.e. robot manipulators, mobile robots and hybrid robots. PUMA 560 robot manipulator is an articulated 6 DOF serial robot manipulator. This robot is widely used in industrial and academic area and also dynamic parameters have been identified and documented in the literature. From the control point of view, robot manipulator divides into two main sections i.e. kinematics and dynamic parts. Estimate dynamic parameters are considerably important to control, mechanical design and simulation (Kurfess, 2005).