Manipulation Ability and Trajectory Control of an Industrial Robot (3rd Report)

This paper presents an application of discrete time model reference adaptive control (MRAC) to a mechanical manipulator. Generally, manipulators are non-linear time varying system and their parameters usually change along the trajectory of the position of joints and time. Therefore we composed the model reference adaptive control system (MRACS) to make the manipulator joints follow a desired trajectory. Model decoupled by non-linear state feedback is used as model of manipulator. Through the simulation experiments, we could obtain a good response (trajectory) compared with the reference trajectory by using the adaptive control scheme, and it was shown that the adaptive controller can make the response of the manipulator insensitive to payload and configuration changes. As a result, the availability of the MRACS was confirmed.