TRACKING CONTROL OF RIGID-LINK ELECTRICALLY-DRIVEN ROBOT MANIPULATORS

This paper illustrates a simple, hand-crafted approach which can be used to design tracking controllers for rigid-link electrically-driven (RLED) robot manipulators. The control methodology is intuitively simple since it is based on concepts readily identified by most control engineers. To illustrate the approach, we develop a corrective tracking controller for the RLED robot dynamics which yields global exponential stability for the link tracking error under the assumption of exact model knowledge. To compensate for the uncertainties in the rigid-link electrically-driven robot model, we then design a corrective robust tracking controller which yields global uniform ultimate bounded stability of the link tracking error. The proposed controller is robust with regard to parametric uncertainties and additive bounded disturbances while correcting for the typically ignored electrical actuator dynamics.