An adaptive trajectory control of manipulators

It is in general difficult to control the motion of mechanical manipulators by the usual deterministic control methods in a wide range of work spaces, because of complex non-linearities of dynamics and parameter uncertainty. This paper proposes an adaptive control method to track desired trajectories which are described by arbitrary task-oriented coordinates. Since the method requires neither a knowledge of parameters of the system nor complicated calculations, it is easy to implement the control law on a microcomputer. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by several simulation results. In particular, an adaptive control law compensating an acceleration term is shown to be very effective for fast motions.