Rivival of Lyapunov´s Direct Method in Robot Control and Design

The intent of this rather expository paper is to show the importance of Lyapunov theory in various aspects of robot control and design of robotic systems. Specifically it is shown that a rather classical linear PD or PID control method adopted in most modern industrial robot manipulators practically works well regardless of high nonlinearity and existence of strong couplings between joints in robot dynamics. In conjunction with this, a means of construction of adequate Lyapunov functions is provided.