Control of robot manipulators with consideration of actuator performance degradation and failures

The problems of control of robot manipulators with actuation degradation and detection of actuation faults are addressed. An adaptive fault tolerant control method is proposed for robot manipulators to maintain the required performance in the presence of actuation degradation, and the same adaptive algorithm is utilized to detect actuation failures. The proposed method can compensate for the effects of not only the parametric model uncertainty, such as payload variations, but also the uncertainty in the actuation torque coefficients. The proposed approach integrates functions of parameter estimation, control law, actuator fault tolerance and fault detection. Theoretical analysis and simulation results confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed method.