Adaptive control of manipulators with supervision of the sampling rate and free-parameters of the adaptation algorithm

An adaptive neural control scheme for mechanical manipulators is proposed. A supervisor is used to improve the system performances during the adaptation transients. The supervisor exerts two supervisory actions. The first one consists basically in updating the free-design adaptive controller, the quadratic loss function is maintained sufficiently small. The second supervisory action consists basically of an online adjustment of the sampling period within an interval centered in a nominal value of the sampling period. The sampling period is selected so that the transient of the tracking error is improved.