An indirect adaptive robot controller

Abstract

Indirect adaptive control of robot manipulators represents an approach parallel to direct and composite adaptive methods. This paper develops a new globally convergent indirect adaptive controller which requires neither measurements of joint acceleration nor inversion of the estimated inertia matrix. Several aspects of this paper, such as new parameter estimators with desirable properties, and a physically-based technique for guaranteeing the uniform positive definiteness of the estimated inertia matrix, along with the related convexity proof, are also of interest in their own right.