Application of adaptive tracking control to industrial robots

This paper presents 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 values of the robot dynamics, and is implemented without calculation of the robot inverse kinematic transformation. This control strategy is globally stable in the presence of bounded disturbances, and in the absence of disturbances the ultimate bound on the size of the residual tracking errors can be made arbitrarily small. An extensive experimental study has been performed using this controller with a PUMA 560 industrial manipulator. These results confirm that the control scheme provides a simple and effective means of obtaining high performance trajectory tracking