Adaptive integral manifold control of flexible joint robot manipulators

The authors extend the integral manifold approach for the control of flexible joint robot manipulators from the known parameter case to the adaptive case. The resulting adaptive law, referred to as the corrective control law, consists of a fast component to damp the fast dynamics and a slow component which is designed based on the integral manifold theory and which consists of a rigid based component along with additional corrective terms. The authors give a detailed derivation of the corrective control law and present tracking results. They illustrate the implementation of the control law using simulation examples and study tracking performance and robustness with respect to an allowable range of stiffness and high adaptation gains