Adaptive control of robot manipulators under constrained motion

An adaptive control algorithm is presented to control simultaneously position and constraint force when a robot manipulator end-effector is in contact with a rigid frictionless constraint surface in the presence of manipulator parameter uncertainty. By exploiting the particular structure of the constrained dynamics, the fundamental properties are obtained to facilitate the controller design. With the unknown manipulator parameters being estimated online, a joint space adaptive control algorithm is derived. The algorithm guarantees global stability and asymptotic convergence of tracking errors for positions and constraint forces in the presence of parameter uncertainty. A detailed numerical example illustrates the proposed method