Approximate Jacobian control of robot manipulators without joint velocity measurements

So far, all of the approximate Jacobian controllers for robot manipulators proposed in the literatures have assumed that the exact joint velocity measurements are available. In this paper, we propose alternative controller designs without the use of joint velocity measurements. To provide the joint velocities used by the controllers, we introduce the well-known sliding mode observers to estimate the robot manipulator states. In addition, Lyapunov analysis is presented to show that the combined controller-observer designs can achieve asymptotical stability in the sliding patch. Simulation results are also presented to show the performance of the proposed methods.