Adaptive force control of the PUMA 560 industrial robot manipulator

Self-tuning adaptive control is used for control of the contact force between the end-effector of PUMA560 and environment. The dynamic model is built up for the unknown environment, the partially known force sensor and elastic device. A simple but reliable PID controller is used, with its gains being continually updated using the most recent estimation of the dynamics of contact. An IBM PS2 is linked to the PUMA560 using DDCMP protocol for a supervisory control and on-line man-machine interface. Initial conditions setting and the subsequent results analysis are performed using MATLAB. Supervisory control is particularly useful for subsea inspections where remote operations are needed, and is an area of continuing research at UCL. One of the experimental tasks in this project is supposed to be subsea inspection, which has been done successfully. The whole PUMA control software package is written in MODULA-2