On the robust control of robot manipulators

A simple robust nonlinear control law for n-link robot manipulators is derived using the Lyapunov-based theory of guaranteed stability of uncertain systems. The novelty of this result lies in the fact that the uncertainty bounds needed to derive the control law and to prove uniform ultimate boundedness of the tracking error depend only on the inertial parameters of the robot. In previous results of this type, the uncertainty bounds have depended not only on the inertia parameters but also on the reference trajectory and on the manipulator state vector. The presented result also removes previous assumptions regarding closeness in norm of the computed inertia matrix to the actual inertial matrix. The design used thus provides the simplest such robust design available to date