Abstract: | An adaptive nonlinear control law that incorporates the manipulator dynamics as well as dynamics of the actuator is developed in this article. The proposed adaptive robust tracking controller requires position measurements only. The controller consists of two parts: a linear observer that generates an estimated error from the error on the joint position, together with a linear feedback controller that utilizes the estimated states. The second part is an adaptive controller that utilizes the feedback states from the linear observer to generate a control effort that takes into consideration the dynamic parameters variation of the robot and actuator. The closed loop system is locally stable in the Lyapunov sense. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. |