Robust Cooperative Manipulation without Force/Torque Measurements: Control Design and Experiments

This paper presents two novel control methodologies for the cooperative manipulation of an object by N robotic agents. Firstly, we design an adaptive control protocol which employs quaternion feedback for the object orientation to avoid potential representation singularities. Secondly, we propose a control protocol that guarantees predefined transient and steady-state performance for the object trajectory. Both methodologies are decentralized, since the agents calculate their own signals without communicating with each other, as well as robust to external disturbances and model uncertainties. Moreover, we consider that the grasping points are rigid, and avoid the need for force/torque measurements. Load distribution is also included via a grasp matrix pseudo-inverse to account for potential differences in the agents' power capabilities. Finally, simulation and experimental results with two robotic arms verify the theoretical findings

Adaptive control of robotic manipulators with unified motion constraints

In this paper, we present an adaptive control of robotic manipulators with parametric uncertainties and motion constraints. Position and velocity constraints are considered and they are unified and converted into the constraint of the nominal input. An adaptive neural network control is developed to achieve trajectory tracking, while the problems of motion constraints are addressed by considering the saturation effect of the nominal input. The uniform boundedness of all closed-loop signals is verified through Lyapunov analysis. Simulation and experiment results on a 2 DOF robotic manipulator demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method

Global Feed-Forward Adaptive Fuzzy Control of Uncertain MIMO Nonlinear Systems

This study proposes a novel adaptive control approach using a feedforward Takagi-Sugeno (TS) fuzzy approximator for a class of highly unknown multi-input multi-output (MIMO) nonlinear plants. First of all, the design concept, namely, feedforward fuzzy approximator (FFA) based control, is introduced to compensate the unknown feedforward terms required during steady state via a forward TS fuzzy system which takes the desired commands as the input variables. Different from the traditional fuzzy approximation approaches, this scheme allows easier implementation and drops the boundedness assumption on fuzzy universal approximation errors. Furthermore, the controller is synthesized to assure either the disturbance attenuation or the attenuation of both disturbances and estimated fuzzy parameter errors or globally asymptotic stable tracking. In addition, all the stability is guaranteed from a feasible gain solution of the derived linear matrix inequality (LMI). Meanwhile, the highly uncertain holonomic constrained systems are taken as applications with either guaranteed robust tracking performances or asymptotic stability in a global sense. It is demonstrated that the proposed adaptive control is easily and straightforwardly extended to the robust TS FFA-based motion/force tracking controller. Finally, two planar robots transporting a common object is taken as an application example to show the expected performance. The comparison between the proposed and traditional adaptive fuzzy control schemes is also performed in numerical simulations. Keywords: Adaptive control; Takagi-Sugeno (TS) fuzzy system; holonomic systems; motion/force control

Nonlinear robust controller design for multi-robot systems with unknown payloads

This work is concerned with the control problem of a multi-robot system handling a payload with unknown mass properties. Force constraints at the grasp points are considered. Robust control schemes are proposed that cope with the model uncertainty and achieve asymptotic path tracking. To deal with the force constraints, a strategy for optimally sharing the task is suggested. This strategy basically consists of two steps. The first detects the robots that need help and the second arranges that help. It is shown that the overall system is not only robust to uncertain payload parameters, but also satisfies the force constraints