A comparative evaluation of adaptive, robust and classical feedback controllers used in unconstrained trajectory tracking for robot manipulators

Four controllers used in the tracking of a demanding fifth order polynomial trajectory were compared. It was found that the adaptive controller outperforms the other controllers. Good performance was also achieved using the compared torque method. The proportional-derivative controller was found to perform poorly for velocity tracking. The approximate dynamics controller gave fair overall performance. The adaptive algorithm is computationally demanding. However, with the floating point digital signal processing products available today this issue is no longer a limiting factor