Stabilizing position/force control of robots interacting with environment by learning connectionist structures

This paper is mostly concerned with the application of connectionist architectures for fast on-line learning of robot dynamic uncertainties used at the executive hierarchical control level in robot contact tasks. The connectionist structures are integrated in non-learning control laws for contact tasks which enable stabilization and good tracking performance of position and force. It has been shown that the problem of tracking a specified reference trajectory and specified force profile with a preset quality of their transient response can be efficiently solved by means of the application of a four-layer perceptron. A four-layer perceptron is part of a hybrid learning control algorithm through the process of synchronous training which uses fast learning rules and available sensor information in order to improve robotic performance progressively in the minimum possible number of learning epochs. Some simulation results of the deburring process with robot MANUTEC r3 are shown to verify effectiveness of the proposed control learning algorithms. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd.