ROBUST ADAPTIVE CONTROLLER-DESIGN FOR FLEXIBLE JOINT MANIPULATORS

In this paper the control problem for robot manipulators with flexible joints is considered. A reduced-order flexible joint model is constru cted based on a singular perturbation formulation of the manipulator e quations of motion. The concept of an integral manifold is utilized to construct the dynamics of a slow subsystem. A fast subsystem is const ructed to represent the fast dynamics of the elastic forces at the joi nts. A composite control scheme is developed based on on-line identifi cation of the manipulator parameters which takes into account the effe ct of certain unmodeled dynamics and parameter variations. Stability a nalysis of the resulting closed-loop full-order system is presented. S imulation results for a single link flexible joint manipulator are giv en to illustrate the applicability of the proposed algorithm.