Learning control of robot manipulators in task space

Abstract

Two important properties of industrial tasks performed by robot manipulators, namely, periodicity (i.e., repetitive nature) of the task and the need for the task to be performed by the end-effector, motivated this work. Not being able to utilize the robot manipulator dynamics due to uncertainties complicated the control design. In a seemingly novel departure from the existing works in the literature, the tracking problem is formulated in the task space and the control input torque is aimed to decrease the task space tracking error directly without making use of inverse kinematics at the position level. A repetitive learning controller is designed which “learns” the overall uncertainties in the robot manipulator dynamics. The stability of the closed-loop system and asymptotic end-effector tracking of a periodic desired trajectory are guaranteed via Lyapunov based analysis methods. Experiments performed on an in-house developed robot manipulator are presented to illustrate the performance and viability of the proposed controller.