An adaptive control scheme for robot manipulators with flexible joints

In this paper, an adaptive control scheme for robot manipulators with flexible joints is proposed. It is based on a previous result on adaptive control of rigid robot manipulators using the regressor dynamics and combined with a linear damping term to handle the joint flexibility. The proposed control scheme has the advantages that it can be efficiently implemented using the recursive regressor dynamics; it does not need acceleration measurements of either the robot joint or the motor shaft; and it can handle the dynamic uncertainties of the robot system, such as the load and the last link dynamics parameters. A computer simulation is included to illustrate the proposed control scheme