Prescribed-time Control Based on Backstepping Method for Trajectory Tracking of Robotic Manipulators

This paper presents a model-free prescribed-time trajectory tracking controller for robotic manipulators. Under the action of the controller, the tracking error can converge at arbitrary specified time regardless of the initial state. The backstepping method is utilized to design the variation law of tracking error step by step. The manipulator dynamics and disturbances are regarded as unknown terms and time-delay estimation are employed to identify them. It is proved that the proposed scheme is globally uniformly prescribed-time stable. As an example, a 2-DOF robot manipulator is considered for numerical simulation.