New tuning conditions for a class of nonlinear PID global regulators of robot manipulators

Several nonlinear proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controllers for robot manipulators that ensure global asymptotic stability have been proposed in the literature. However, the tuning criteria obtained are expressed in terms of conditions so restrictive that they have avoided, until now, carrying out experimental tests with such controllers. Tuning criteria of some PID controllers for robot manipulators with conditions more relaxed than those presented previously in the literature have been proposed in two recent works by the authors. This was achieved by setting the tuning conditions individually for each joint instead of general conditions for the whole robot. In this paper we extend these results to a class of nonlinear PID global regulators for robot manipulators. The obtained tuning criteria are given in terms of conditions so relaxed that they have allowed to carry out, for the first time, experimental essays with these controllers. Such experiments are presented in this paper using a two-degrees-of-freedom robot manipulator.