Comparative experiments of robust and adaptive control with new robust adaptive controllers for robot manipulators

Several conceptually different robust adaptive schemes, namely, a smooth robust adaptive sliding mode controller with guaranteed transient performance, a robust desired compensation adaptive controller with guaranteed transient performance, a simple robust performance based adaptive control scheme which has a nonlinear PID feedback structure with adaptation gains, and a robust desired compensation adaptive controller which is synthesized by combining the design techniques of performance based adaptive control and model based adaptive control and is easy to tune, are proposed for trajectory tracking control of robot manipulators. The schemes as well as other established adaptive schemes are implemented and compared on the UCB/NSK SCARA direct drive robot. Experimental results are obtained to show the advantages and the drawbacks of each method