ADAPTIVE-CONTROL OF AN INDUSTRIAL ROBOT RETROFITTED WITH AN OPEN-ARCHITECTURE CONTROLLER

A PUMA 560 industrial robot has been retrofitted with an open-architec ture controller. An adaptive control scheme that incorporates actuator dynamics has been implemented on this robot testbed. The overall low level control scheme is based on the complete robot-actuator dynamics, and consists of a modified regressor-based adaptive algorithm and a f eedforward compensation scheme for actuator dynamics. It is shown by a Lyapunov-like analysis that, under this control scheme, the tracking error of a general robot is bounded. Experiments carried out show that the performance of the robot, with the adaptive control scheme, is si gnificantly improved when properly compensated for actuator dynamics.