EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS OF AN ADAPTIVE CONTROLLER FOR ROBOT MANIPULATORS

This article presents the implementation and experimentation of a tran sputer-based adaptive control system on an industrial robot PUMA 560. The adaptive control problem has been extensively studied in simulatio ns, but experimental results will highlight the performance potential and is more interesting for the practice. An experimental study of the real-time performance of an adaptive model-based controller will be d emonstrated here, which is based on the Lyapunov stability theory. Esp ecially, the effect of the unknown load dynamics is considered. A tran sputer network consisting of 10 transputers is employed to realize the control system, where the parallelization of the algorithms is utiliz ed for speeding up the computation. Some practical implementation issu es of such controller are considered in context of a multiprocessor en vironment. (C) 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.