Sliding observer and adaptive control of robot manipulators using joint position feedback

This paper considers control of rigid robot manipulators with revolute joints in the absence of knowledge of the robot model physical parameters using only joint angular position feedback. A sliding mode observer is constructed to estimate the joint angular velocities. An adaptive estimation and control law is derived such that in the closed-loop system, the tracking error and the state estimation error asymptotically converge to zero. The adaptive controller includes a dynamic system in the feedback path and requires no knowledge of the robot´s dynamics in its derivation