Region Reaching Control of Robots: Theory and Experiments

In conventional setpoint control problems of robot, the desired position is specified as a point. However, in some applications, the desired target is a region instead of a point. In this paper, we propose a new control concept called region reaching control for robot manipulators. In this new control concept, the desired objective can be specified as a region instead of a point. Several region reaching controllers are proposed in task space. Since the desired region can be specified arbitrarily small, the region control concept is also a generalization of setpoint control problem. Lyapunov-like functions are presented for the convergence analysis. Experiment results based on a SONY SCARA robot are presented to illustrate the performance of the proposed region reaching controllers.