Robust adaptive control of flexible joint manipulators

This paper presents an application of the robust adaptive design procedure developed in Jain and Khorrami (1995) to flexible joint manipulators. The design guarantees robustness to parametric and dynamic uncertainties and also rejects any bounded, unmeasurable disturbances entering the system. In the strict matching case, the scheme can be used to design robust controllers for robotic manipulators. The design is extended to systems transformable to a special strict feedback form. The proposed scheme when applied to multi-link robotic manipulators with joint flexibility guarantees a robust performance even if the Coriolis, centrifugal, joint flexibility and friction terms in the manipulator dynamics are completely unknown.