Joint-space adaptive control of robot end-effectors performing slow and precise motions

A joint-space adaptive control scheme is developed for controlling the position of a 6-degree-of-freedom robot end-effector that performs precise motion within a small workspace and was built to study autonomous assembly of NASA hardware. The slave arm of a telerobotic system is controlled. The techniques developed will be applied in space. The design of the adaptive controller is based on the concept of model reference adaptive control and the Lyapunov direct method under the assumption that the robot motion is slowly time-varying. Computer simulation results of the developed control scheme applied to a 2-d.o.f. robot end-effector are presented