Experimental evaluation of adaptive and robust schemes for robot manipulator control

In this paper, adaptive and robust control schemes are compared in the tracking control of robot manipulator. In adaptive control, the authors classify the adaptive control laws that have been proposed into three types. They show that the most important difference among them is that in their PD gains. They investigate their tracking performances by laboratory experiment and show that they can have similar performances by adjusting their equivalent PD gains almost equally. In robust control, two degree of freedom (TDOF) controller is examined. The authors demonstrate its strong disturbance rejection performance and robustness to parameter variation by experiment. They analyze the stability of TDOF controller against the payload change. Finally, through these experiments, they consider the advantages of adaptive and robust schemes for robot manipulator control.