Decentralised adaptive control of cooperating Robotic manipulators with disturbance observers

In this study, the authors present decentralised adaptive controllers for two cooperating robotic manipulators moving an object with constrained trajectory/force in the presence of dynamics uncertainties and external disturbances. The cooperating manipulators are described as an aggregation of subsystems. For control design, first a decentralised local dynamics coupled with physical interactions between subsystems is developed, and then a decentralised adaptive control merging parameter adaptation and disturbance observer is constructed, such that motion and force trajectories converge to the desired manifolds and the effect of non-parametrisable uncertainties is compensated by the disturbance observer. Experiment studies are carried out to show the efficiency of the control design.