An adaptive output feedback controller for robot arms: Stability and experiments (Q5939324)

This paper describes an adaptive feedback controller for robust arms designed using partial state feedback. Only position measurements of the robotic joint are used to design the adaptive controller. A simple nonlinear observer is designed to estimate the velocity of the robotic joints. The authors show that the closed loop system consisting of the adaptive controller, observer, and robot system is semi-globally asymptotically stable. Thus the region of attraction can be increased arbitrarily by increasing the gains of the controller and the observer. The authors conducted experiments with a two link planar arm to validate their proposed controller-observer design. In addition, the authors compared their scheme experimentally against a well-known passivity-based controller implemented with exact knowledge of system parameters. The authors' approach produced results similar to the passivity controller, even when there were large uncertainties in the robot parameters.