Adaptive Passivity-Based Multi-Task Tracking Control for Robotic Manipulators

Adaptive control of robot manipulators based on the use of a sliding variable and the passivity property of the dynamic equations was originally designed and successfully applied to task tracking in joint space few decades ago. Surprisingly, no extension is available to date for the multi-task case such that the controller tends towards enforcing strict task priorities as the parameters tend to their real values. Given the importance of both multi-task control and adaptive algorithms, an approach that deals with this situation has an important impact in the robotic field. This letter provides a solution to this problem leveraging on our recent formulation of hierarchical multi-task impedance control for trajectory tracking and on geometric methods for model identification. Experiments are used to validate the stability analysis.