Adaptive control of flexible joint manipulators

The authors present an adaptive control result for flexible-joint robot manipulators. Under the assumption of weak joint elasticity, a singular perturbation argument is used to show that recent adaptive control results for rigid robots can be used to control flexible-joint robots, provided a simple correction term is added to the control law to damp out the elastic oscillations at the joints. In this way, fundamental properties of rigid robot dynamics can be used to design robust adaptive control laws for flexible-joint robots. The implementation of the full controller requires only joint position and velocity information. Thus, robustness to parametric uncertainty is achieved without the need for acceleration and jerk measurements