Adaptive P‐type iterative learning radial basis function control for robot manipulators with unknown varying disturbances and unknown input dead zone

Summary This article proposes an adaptive iterative learning radial basis function (RBF) scheme to solve the trajectory‐tracking problem for perturbed robot manipulators with unknown iteration varying disturbances and unknown dead‐zone input. It is well known that the presence of the dead zone in actuators and mechatronics devices gives rise to extra difficulty due to the presence of singularity in the input channels. Hence, it is interesting to take this problem into account when synthesizing a controller. This synthesis is made here. In addition, the control design is very simple in the sense that we use, only, the proportional gain. Therefore, the considerable amount noise caused by the sensors for velocity measurements of robot manipulators is avoided. Another advantage of this work is that the unknown disturbances are assumed to be time varying and also varying from iteration to iteration. Thus, the RBF neural network is used to approximate these unknown nonlinear functions. Using the Lyapunov theory, the analysis of the stability of the closed‐loop system is guaranteed when the iteration number tends to infinity. Finally, simulation results on the PUMA 560 arm are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. In order to evaluate the performance of our controller, a comparison of our results with other method is also given.