Adaptive nonlinear control for manipulators with joint elasticity

The problem of designing an adaptive control scheme for a flexible-joint manipulator is investigated and solved in this paper. A nonlinear model-based control scheme for the tracking of link variables is presented. Moreover, to circumvent the performance degradation due to parametric uncertainty, an adaptive control scheme is further proposed. In the developed control laws, only the position and velocity information of the actuators and links are utilized. Numerical simulations are also given to show the effectiveness of the proposed control laws.