A NEW CLASS OF ADAPTIVE CONTROLLERS FOR ROBOT TRAJECTORY TRACKING

This article presents a new class of adaptive schemes for the motion c ontrol of robot manipulators. The proposed controllers are very genera l and computationally efficient because they do not require knowledge of either the mathematical model or the parameter values of the manipu lator dynamics, and are implemented without calculation of the robot i nverse dynamics or inverse kinematic transformations. It is shown that the control strategies are globally uniformly bounded in the presence of bounded disturbances, and that in the absence of disturbances the ultimate bound on the size of the tracking errors can be made arbitrar ily small. Computer simulation results are given for a PUMA 560 manipu lator, and demonstrate that accurate and robust trajectory tracking ca n be achieved by using the proposed controllers. (C) 1994 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.