Fixed-Time Neural Control of Robot Manipulator With Global Stability and Guaranteed Transient Performance

Nowadays, due to many limitations in reality, the optimization of tracking precision and convergence time has attracted the attention of researchers in robotics community. In this article, a fixed-time adaptive neural network (NN) controller is proposed for unknown robot manipulators. A switching mechanism is integrated into the control design such that the semiglobal stability of the conventional NN control systems can be extended to global stability. The time-varying barrier Lyapunov function and the fixed-time control technique are incorporated into the controller design to guarantee the prescribed motion constraints and the fixed-time convergence simultaneously. Compared with some existing fixed-time NN control algorithms, the assumption that NN weight should be upper bounded can be relaxed in our work. Finally, the simulation and experiment studies are respectively carried out based on an unknown 2-degree of freedom robot and a Baxter robot to demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed control scheme.