Adaptive control of flexible-joint manipulators

Under the assumption of weak joint elasticity, a singular perturbation argument is used to show that recent adaptive control results for rigid robots can be used to control flexible-joint robots provided a simple correction term is added to the control law to damp out the elastic oscillations at the joints. In this way, fundamental properties of rigid robot dynamics can be exploited to design adaptive control laws for flexible-joint robots that are robust to parametric uncertainty. Experimental results are given to illustrate the theory.<>