Extension of the partial state feedback approach to the control of robotic manipulators

This work proposes a simple robot control algorithm requiring position measurements only. The control scheme is shown to be suitable for point-to-point tasks of rigid-link robots with gravity compensation and for flexible joint robots with no gravitational effects. Lyapunov stability analyses show global asymptotic error convergence for both cases. In addition, the proposed controller does not require precise knowledge of the system model. Simulation results show the proposed controller works well for point-to-point control, and its advantages are illustrated by a comparison to the traditional PD control.