Adaptive control of electrically-driven manipulators: theory and experiments

This paper presents a new trajectory tracking control scheme for uncertain rigid-link electrically-driven manipulators. The proposed controller is an adaptive strategy which is general, computationally efficient, and readily implementable, and which requires virtually no information concerning either the manipulator or actuator models. It is shown that the controller ensures semiglobal uniform boundedness of all signals in the presence of bounded disturbances, and that the ultimate size of the tracking errors can be made arbitrarily small. Experimental results are presented for an IMI Zebra Zero manipulator and confirm that the proposed approach provides a simple and effective means of obtaining high performance trajectory tracking with this class of manipulators.