Nonlinear adaptive motion control for manipulators with compliant joints

How to perform control and achieve stability of robotic manipulators with joint flexibility forms a problem of profound practical and theoretical interest. This paper is to investigate and to solve this problem without strict assumption on the joint stiffness. Here, an adaptive control scheme of a flexible-joint manipulator, which takes into account its full nonlinear dynamics, is presented. Without the knowledge of the system model, the developed control lams, requiring only the position and velocity information of the actuators and links, is capable of driving the link tracking errors asymptotically to zero, while maintaining the uniform boundedness of all signals in the closed-loop system. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control law, an example of a two-link flexible-joint manipulator is constructed and a number of computer simulations are performed which show quite satisfactory results