On robust saturation control of robot manipulators

A new robust control method for robot manipulators is proposed in this paper. The new method possesses two characteristics different from those of known robust control laws: 1) it distinguishes between uncertainty in the inertia matrix, Coriolis and centripetal parameters, and the gravity; and 2) the uncertainty bounds needed to design the control law and to prove uniform ultimate boundedness of the tracking error depend only on the physical parameters and known functions of the generalized co-ordinates, hence they are simple to compute. The proposed method is based on designing a robust controller for each source of uncertainty such that the control parameters can be directly related to properties of the robot dynamics and can be adjusted according to the response to external stimuli. As an illustration, the proposed control method is applied to a robot arm, and the effectiveness of the scheme is confined by simulation