Experimental evaluation of robot controllers

In the last decade an abundance of control laws for nonlinear robotic systems was proposed. A careful evaluation of several classes of these controllers has been made, to overcome some drawbacks of previous evaluations. Experiments were done on a simple robotic system, with prismatic joints only and with low cost controller hardware. A flexible and effective real-time software environment, using object oriented programming techniques, was developed, easing the implementation and the evaluation of many control laws. The experience gained leads to the recommendation to develop as good a model as possible combined with adaptive control for tuning of the model parameters