Adaptive control of rigid-link electrically-driven robots actuated with brushless DC motors

Extends the work of Bridges, Dawson and Gao (1993) and Hu and Dawson (1993) to design an adaptive controller for rigid-link electrically-driven (RLED) robot manipulators specifically actuated with brushless direct current (BLDC) motors. In particular the adaptive controller presented in the second paper is tailored to handle the multi-link dynamics of a rigid-link robot as opposed to a simple inertial load. Furthermore, the linear electrical dynamics of brushed DC motors used in the development of the first paper, are replaced with the multiple input nonlinear dynamics of BLDC motors. The result is an adaptive controller that guarantees globally asymptotic convergence of the link position tracking error in spite of parametric uncertainty throughout the entire electro-mechanical model