PERFORMANCE-BASED ADAPTIVE TRACKING CONTROL OF ROBOT MANIPULATORS

This article presents two new adaptive schemes for the motion control of robot manipulators. The proposed controllers are very general and c omputationally efficient because they do not require knowledge of eith er the mathematical model or the parameter values of the manipulator d ynamics, and are implemented without calculation of the robot inverse dynamics or inverse kinematic transformation. It is shown that the con trol strategies are globally stable in the presence of bounded disturb ances, and that in the absence of disturbances the ultimate bound on t he size of the tracking errors can be made arbitrarily small. Computer simulation results are given for a PUMA 560 manipulator, and demonstr ate that accurate and robust trajectory tracking can be achieved by us ing the proposed controllers. Experimental results are presented for a n IMI Zebra Zero manipulator and confirm that the control schemes prov ide a simple and effective means of obtaining high-performance traject ory tracking. (C) 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.