Approximate Path Following Control of Robotic Manipulators: An Adaptive Dynamic Programming-based Method

This paper studies a path planning and following control for a 4-DOF (degree of freedom) robotic manipulator. A critical question arising in practice is to achieve acceptable transient performance so that the real system state responses can be sufficiently close to the reference or planned path due to physical constraints or obstacle avoidance requirement for instance. The present study is to explore an event-triggered method to schedule a sequence of adaptive dynamic programming (ADP) controllers. It eventually gives rise to an approximate path following control for the robotic manipulator end-effectors. To show the efficacy of the proposed results, we perform simulations on a simplified excavator physical model.