Robot manipulator control using decentralized linear time-invariant time-delayed joint controllers

It is shown that robot manipulator control can be accomplished using simple decentralized linear time invariant time-delayed joint controllers instead of the complicated computed torque control scheme. This means that all the online computational problems associated with computing robot inverse dynamics can be avoided, and the robot control problem is essentially reduced to that of computing n linear proportional-derivation controls for n joint subsystems. The proposed control technique employs a time-delayed control with a specially designed constant diagonal gain matrix to decouple and linearize the robot joint dynamics so that linear centralized joint control can be achieved. It is shown that the proposed controller is stable, and the value of the special gain matrix can be selected based on a sufficient condition of stability presently developed. However, the establishment of this sufficient condition requires knowledge of the inertial matrix of the robot. It is also shown that the controller is robust in the presence of payload uncertainty. A two-link planar robot is presented to illustrate the controller design procedures and the performance of the controller