Adaptive position/force regulation of robots without rate information

This paper considers the position/force regulation problem for rigid robots interacting with the environment for the case in which only joint position and contact force measurements are available, and proposes an adaptive controller as a solution to this problem. The proposed adaptive strategy is derived under the assumption that no information is available concerning the manipulator model or the environment, and is shown to provide uniform boundedness of all signals and exponential convergence of the position and force errors to a set that can be made arbitrarily small. Computer simulation results are given for a Robotics Research Corporation Model K-1207 redundant robot and demonstrate that the proposed approach provides an effective means of obtaining accurate position/force regulation in the presence of uncertainty regarding the manipulator, payload, and environment.