Decentralized adaptive control of electrically-driven manipulators

This paper presents two new decentralized strategies for motion control of uncertain electrically-driven manipulators. The first controller is an adaptive position regulation scheme which ensures semiglobal asymptotic convergence of the position error if no external disturbances are present and semiglobal convergence of the error to an arbitrarily small neighborhood of zero in the presence of bounded disturbances. It is shown that the regulation scheme can be modified to provide accurate trajectory tracking control through the introduction of adaptive feedforward elements in the control law; this second control strategy retains the simple decentralized structure of the first controller and ensures arbitrarily accurate tracking in the presence of bounded disturbances. Each of the adaptive schemes is very efficient computationally and requires virtually no information concerning either the manipulator or actuator models. The results of computer simulations and laboratory experiments with both terrestrial and space manipulators demonstrate that accurate and robust motion control can be achieved by using the proposed approach. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd