Adaptive compliant motion control of manipulators without velocity measurements

This paper presents two adaptive schemes for compliant motion control of uncertain manipulators: an adaptive impedance controller and an adaptive position/force controller. The proposed controllers are very general and computationally efficient, need virtually no information regarding the manipulator dynamic model or the environment, and require only position and force measurements for implementation. It is shown that the schemes ensure semiglobal uniform boundedness of all signals in the presence of bounded disturbances, and that the ultimate size of the system errors can be made arbitrarily small. The capabilities of the proposed control strategies are illustrated though both computer simulations and laboratory experiments with a six degree-of-freedom (DOF) IMI Zebra Zero manipulator