Task-space cooperative tracking control of networked manipulators with uncertain kinematics and dynamics

In this paper, we investigate a distributed control approach to addressing the task-space synchronized tracking problem of networked manipulators with uncertain kinematics and dynamics, where the dynamic leader is available to only a subset of followers and followers have only local interaction. Specifically, without task-space velocity measurements, a disturbance observer is introduced to identify and compensate for uncertain dynamics while an adaptive law is designed to estimate the uncertain kinematics. Besides, it is strictly proved that the proposed control scheme ensures that tracking errors converge to zero as time tends to infinity. In the end, simulation results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed controller.