This paper derives two adaptive fuzzy controllers for robot manipulators. These controllers make use of parameter adaptation laws driven by joint motion tracking errors, and do not need feedback of joint accelerations. Moreover, they do not require the exact robot dynamics but only the boundary of the dynamics. Other adaptive controllers either neglect the dynamics completely or need extensive knowledge of the equations that model the robot. The proposed controllers (DAFC and IAFC) guarantee the global stability of the resulting closed-loop system in the sense that all signals are bounded. A two-link robot example is worked out where the goal of the control is to track a sine-wave trajectory with time-varying mass profile. It was verified by simulation that both controllers perform good tracking after initial adaptation.
Reviewer: S.G.Tzafestas (Athens)