Optimal position control for robot manipulators

This paper deals with the optimal position control in joint-space coordinate of robot manipulators. An optimal position algorithm based on Pontryagin maximum principle is proposed. Our main contribution is to proof that the closed-loop system composed by full nonlinear robot dynamics and optimal position control is globally asymptotically stable in agreement with Lyapunov´s direct method and LaSalle´s invariance principle. Besides the theoretical results, time-real experimental result is presented to illustrate the performance of proposed optimal algorithm on a pendula-robot.