Robustness of PID-controlled manipulators with respect to external disturbances

We present a robustness analysis for PID-controlled robot manipulators. For robot manipulators under the influence of external disturbances we provide a proof, and a tuning procedure, to establish uniform semiglobal practical asymptotic stability. In particular, in contrasts to other works on robust stability of PIDs, we do not use La Salle´s principle but provide a strict Lyapunov function. The perturbations that we consider include discontinuous functions of the state, such as Coulomb friction. As corollaries of our main results, one may conclude the same stability property for the case of motion control using linear PID