Adaptive tracking control of manipulators: theory and experiments

This paper present a new adaptive scheme for motion control of robot manipulators. The proposed controller is very general and computationally efficient since it does not require knowledge of either the mathematical model or the parameter valves of the robot dynamics, and is implemented without calculation of the robot inverse kinematic transformation. It is shown that the control strategy is globally stable in the presence of bounded disturbances, and that in the absence of disturbances the ultimate bound on the size of the residual tracking errors can be made arbitrarily small. Computer simulation results are given for a PUMA 560 manipulator, and demonstrate that accurate and robust trajectory tracking are achieved by using the proposed controller. Experimental results are presented for a PUMA 560 manipulator and confirm that the control scheme provides a simple and effective means of obtaining high performance trajectory tracking