ROBUST ESTIMATION AND CONTROL OF ROBOTIC MANIPULATORS

For the trajectory following problem of a robot manipulator, a robust estimation and control scheme which requires only position measurement s is proposed to guarantee uniform ultimate bounded stability under si gnificant uncertainties and disturbances in the robot dynamics. The sc heme combines a class of robust control laws with a robust estimator w here the robust control law can be chosen to be either a modification of the standard computed torque control law or simply a linear and dec entralized ''PD'' control law. The proposed robust estimator is also l inear and decentralized for easy implementation. Constructive choices of the gains in the control law and estimator are proposed which depen d only on the coefficients of a polynomial bounding function of the un known dynamics. The asymptotic stability of the tracking errors and th e estimation error is also investigated. Experimentation results verif y the theoretical analysis.