Decentralized adaptive tracking control of robot manipulators

An asymptotically stable decentralized adaptive control scheme is presented to enable accurate trajectory tracking without requiring specific knowledge about the robot dynamics. The scheme is based on expressing the robot dynamics as the product of individual joint quantities, and bounds on certain robot parameters. Parameter adaptation laws are derived using the Lyapunov theory, and asymptotic stability of tracking errors, and boundedness of parameter estimates are established. The control system is shown to be robust to torque disturbances affecting the system and to a class of unmodeled dynamics. The structure of the controller and the performance of the closed-loop system are analyzed. Simulations results using the complete dynamic model of a six degree of freedom industrial robot are presented to demonstrate the excellent tracking performance of the proposed adaptive control scheme. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.