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In this paper, by combining fractional calculus and sliding mode control theory, a new fractional order adaptive terminal sliding mode controller is proposed for the maximum power point tracking in a solar cell. To find the maximum power point, the incremental conductance method has been used. First, a fractional order terminal sliding mode controller is designed in which the control law depends on knowing the upper bound of uncertainty in the system, but in practical application it is difficult or in some cases impossible to calculate this upper limit. In this paper, an adaptive law is given for online calculating of this parameter. The stability proof of the sliding surface, as well as the proof of finite time convergence of closed-loop system, are investigated using the Lyapunov theory. Finally, the performance of the proposed controller is evaluated both in normal and partial shading conditions. For a better comparison of the proposed controller, the performance of this controller is compared in the presence of load variations and the variations of system parameters with the conventional (integer order) terminal sliding mode control.

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The forward kinematic problem of parallel robots is always considered as a challenge in the field of parallel robots due to the obtained nonlinear system of equations. In this paper, the forward kinematic problem of planar parallel robots in their workspace is investigated using a neural network based approach. In order to increase the accuracy of this method, the workspace of the parallel robot is divided into a number of smaller subspaces using the classifier and the boundary overlap method. After estimating the corresponding subspace, two separate neural networks are used in each subspace to determine the position and orientation of the moving platform. This approach is implemented on a 3-PRR planar parallel robot and its results are compared with the results obtained from the MLP, WaveNet, GMDH, Dual and Independent neural networks. Moreover, in order to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed method, a circular motion path is simulated using this approach and its performance is compared with the five mentioned methods. The results obtained from the implementation of this approach and comparison with the conventional methods indicates that the proposed method analyzes the forward kinematic problem of planar parallel robot with proper accuracy.