Decentralized control of robot manipulators with couplings and uncertainties

For a class of robot manipulators which contain nonlinear couplings and uncertainties, this paper presents decentralized stabilizing controllers and tracking controllers. In the former case, the system state is ensured to lie ultimately in a prescribed neighborhood of the origin and this neighborhood can be made arbitrarily small. In the latter case, the system is guaranteed to ultimately track a desired model with a prescribed error and this tracking error can also be made arbitrarily small. Moreover, this approach can admit larger nonlinear couplings and uncertainties in the robot manipulator system