Adaptive control of robotic manipulators: experimental results

An adaptive motion control scheme for robotic manipulators is presented. This is an adaptive computed torque method (CTM) that requires only position measurements. These measurements and the input torques are used in an extended Kalman filter (EKF) to estimate the inertial parameter of the full nonlinear robot model as well as the joint positions and velocities. These estimates are used by the CTM to generate the input torques. This combination of the EKF and the CTM was shown to result in a stable adaptive control scheme. Experimental results with a two-degree-of-freedom direct-drive robot illustrate the performance of this scheme