Decentralized adaptive control of manipulators: theory and experiments

This paper presents a decentralized adaptive scheme for motion control of robot manipulators. The proposed controller is very simple computationally, does not require knowledge of either the mathematical model or the parameter values of the robot dynamics, and is shown to be globally stable in the presence of bounded disturbances. Furthermore, the control strategy is very general and is implementable for either position regulation or trajectory tracking in either joint-space or task-space. Experimental results are given for a PUMA 560 industrial manipulator and demonstrate that accurate and robust trajectory tracking is achievable with the proposed controller