Implementation of an Adaptive Control Algorithm on a Six DOF Robot Manipulator

Adaptive control is an appealing approach for the control of the robot manipulators due to presence of disturbances and uncertainties in the dynamic model of the robot. Several studies in the literature provided the derivation of globally convergent adaptive controllers. However, these studies generally presented in the absence of experimental work on complex systems such as six-DOF robot manipulator. This paper presents the implementation of an adaptive control algorithm that is proposed by an earlier study in the literature for motion control of a six-DOF robot manipulator. An integral term is also added to the original control law to reduce steady-state errors. Experimental results show that in general sensitivity of the position error to varying payload is less for the adaptive control compared to non-adaptive approaches such as computed torque control.