Robust tracking of rigid-link flexible-joint electrically-driven robots

The authors present a simple approach for designing tracking controllers for rigid-link flexible-joint robot manipulators. The control approach is intuitively simple since it is based on concepts which are familiar to most control engineers. To illustrate the approach, the authors develop a robust tracking controller that achieves global uniform ultimate boundedness, stability of the link tracking error in spite of bounded disturbances, and model uncertainty. They then discuss some extensions for rigid-link electrically driven and for rigid-link flexible-joint electrically driven robot manipulators