Practical stabilizability of uncertain dynamical systems: Application to robotic tracking (Q800274)

The tracking problem for a robotic manipulator with n controlled degrees of freedom and uncertain dynamics is considered. Based on a deterministic theory and requiring only knowledge of bounds on the system uncertainty a class \({\mathcal C}\) of continuous feedback controls is proposed with respect to which the uncertain tracking system is practically stabilizable in the sense that, given a feasible path to be tracked and an arbitrarily small neighborhood \(\Sigma\) of the origin in the appropriate error space, there exists a control in \({\mathcal C}\) such that the tracking error for the feedback controlled uncertain system is ultimately bounded with respect to \(\Sigma\). The theory is illustrated in a numerical example of a robot with two degrees of freedom.