ADAPTIVE COMPLIANT MOTION CONTROL FOR DEXTEROUS MANIPULATORS

This article presents two adaptive schemes for compliant motion contro l of dexterous manipulators. The first scheme is developed using an ad aptive impedance control approach for torque-controlled manipulators, whereas the second strategy is an adaptive admittance controller for p osition-controlled manipulators. The proposed controllers are very gen eral and computationally efficient, as they do not require knowledge o f the manipulator dynamic model or parameter values of the manipulator or the environment and are implemented without calculation of the inv erse dynamics or inverse kinematic transformation. It is shown that th e control strategies are globally stable in the presence of bounded di sturbances and that in the absence of disturbances the ultimate bound on the size of the system errors can be made arbitrarily small. The ca pabilities of the proposed control schemes are illustrated through bot h computer simulations and laboratory experiments with a dexterous Rob otics Research Corporation Seven-degrees-of-freedom (DOF) manipulator.