This project is a multidisciplinary activity involving research in adaptive control, robotics and magnetic disk technology. The adaptive control work concerns theoretical and practical considerations in the design of robust adaptive controllers for mechanical systems in the presence of unmodelled dynamics, such as high frequency flexural modes, and mechanical nonlinearities, such as Coulomb friction and stiction. The robotics work concerns investigating the derivation, development, and experimental verification of continuous time and discrete time adaptive control schemes for robotic manipulators and the development of cartesian space straight line trajectory generation algorithms and robot motion control using end effector cartesian coordinates feedback instead of joint coordinates feedback control. In the area of magnetic disk technology, the research addresses the application of self tuning techniques to measure the absolute in-plant motion of the recording head and control tuning and testing of high performance disk file systems.
