Adaptive tracking control of manipulators using only position measurements

This paper presents a new approach to trajectory tracking control of uncertain manipulators using only position measurements. The proposed control strategy is an adaptive scheme which is very general and computationally efficient, requires virtually no information regarding the manipulator dynamic model, and is implementable without calculation of the robot inverse dynamics or inverse kinematic transformations. It is shown that the controller ensures semiglobal uniform boundedness of all signals in the presence of bounded disturbances, and that the ultimate size of the tracking errors can be made arbitrarily small