DECENTRALIZED ADAPTIVE-CONTROL OF ELECTRICALLY-DRIVEN MANIPULATORS

This paper presents two new decentralized strategies for motion contro l of uncertain electrically-driven manipulators. The first controller is an adaptive position regulation scheme which ensures semiglobal asy mptotic 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 accura te trajectory tracking control through the introduction of adaptive fe edforward elements in the control law; this second control strategy re tains the simple decentralized structure of the first controller and e nsures arbitrarily accurate tracking in the presence of bounded distur bances. Each of the adaptive schemes is very efficient computationally and requires virtually no information concerning either the manipulat or or actuator models. The results of computer simulations and laborat ory experiments with both terrestrial and space manipulators demonstra te that accurate and robust motion control can be achieved by using th e proposed approach. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd