ROBUST ADAPTIVE-CONTROL OF REDUNDANT MANIPULATORS

This paper presents an adaptive scheme for the motion control of kinem atically redundant manipulators. The proposed controller is very gener al and computationally efficient since it does not require knowledge o f either the mathematical model or the parameter values of the robot d ynamics, and is implemented without calculation of the robot inverse d ynamics or inverse kinematic transformation. It is shown that the cont rol strategy is globally stable in the presence of bounded disturbance s, and that in the absence of disturbances the size of the residual tr acking errors can be made arbitrarily small. The performance of the co ntroller is illustrated through computer simulations with a nine degre e-of-freedom (DOF) compound manipulator consisting of a relatively sma ll, fast six-DOF manipulator mounted on a large three-DOF positioning device. These simulations demonstrate that the proposed scheme provide s accurate and robust trajectory tracking and, moreover, permits the a vailable redundancy to be utilized so that a high bandwidth response c an be achieved over a large workspace.