A simple adaptive control approach for flexible joint robots

This paper investigates the adaptive tracking problem for flexible joint robots with uncertain parameters and disturbances. A simple adaptive controller is proposed by combining adaptive backstepping and dynamic surface control techniques. Overparametrization problem and explosion of complexity problem existing in the backstepping methods are both avoid. It is proved that all the signals of the resulting closed-loop system are semi-globally uniformly ultimately bounded, and the tracking errors can be made arbitrarily small. Finally, a simulation example is provided to demonstrate the validness of the proposed approach.