Global positioning of robot manipulators via PD control plus a class of nonlinear integral actions

This paper deals with the position control of robot manipulators. Proposed is a simple class of robot regulators consisting of a linear proportional-derivative (PD) feedback plus an integral action of a nonlinear function of position errors. By using Lyapunov's direct method and LaSalle's invariance principle, the authors characterize a class of such nonlinear functions, and they provide explicit conditions on the regulator gains to ensure global asymptotic stability. These regulators offer an attractive alternative to global regulation compared with the well-known partially model-based PD control with gravity compensation and PD control with desired gravity compensation.