Adaptive tracking control design of constrained robot systems

Abstract

Both dynamic state feedback as well as output feedback tracking control designs are presented in this paper for constrained robot systems under parametric uncertainties and external disturbances. The previous studies on tracking control design, not considering the velocity measurements, address only the unconstrained robot design. In contrast, a dynamic output feedback controller based on a linear and reduced-order observer that uses only position measurements is proposed here for the first time to treat the trajectory tracking control problem of constrained robot systems. Both adaptive state feedback control schemes and adaptive output feedback control schemes with a guaranteed H∞ performance are constructed. It is shown that all the variables of the closed-loop system are bounded and a pre-assigned H∞ tracking performance is achieved, in the sense that the influence of external disturbance on the tracking motion error can be attenuated to any specified level. Moreover, it is also shown that the motion and force trajectories asymptotically converge to the desired ones as the dynamic model of robot systems is well-known and the external disturbance is neglected. Finally, simulation examples are presented to illustrate the tracking performance of a two-link robotic manipulator with a circular path constraint by the proposed control algorithms. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.