Hydraulic manipulators exhibit strong coupling, pronounced nonlinearities, and significant modeling uncertainties, which hinder high-precision motion control. This paper proposes a finite-time disturbance observer–based nonlinear robust adaptive control (RAC-FTDO) framework enhanced by a physically consistent dynamic parameter identification scheme. The entire system dynamics, including the hydraulic dynamics, is first derived. A weighted least squares approach is employed to obtain inertial and friction parameters under physical constraints, enabling reliable feedforward compensation. Building on back-stepping principles, an adaptive controller systematically integrates an FTDO and a nonlinear robust strategy, enabling rapid and accurate estimation and compensation of both parametric uncertainties and unmodeled disturbances, while suppressing residual estimation errors and avoiding high-gain feedback. Through Lyapunov stability analysis, the proposed controller achieves improved transient behavior and asymptotic tracking performance. The proposed approach can be extended to multi-degree-of-freedom serial systems and has been experimentally validated on a hydraulic manipulator against several benchmark controllers, demonstrating its effectiveness.
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2026 The Author(s). International Journal of Mechanical System Dynamics published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd on behalf of Nanjing University of Science and Technology.
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