There is a strong current research interest in adaptive control of robots, that is, control strategies which would allow a robot manipulator to automatically adapt to changes in its environment, loads, or to exceptional disturbances in order to successfully complete manipulation or assembly tasks. Some controller designs rely on approximations of system dynamics while others require measurements of joint accelerations and inversion of inertia matrices. This project further develops a new method which utilizes system kinetic energy rather than the fully expanded system dynamics. The method's strengths include guaranteed global convergence of the tracking, and computational simplicity. The project's focus is external control of unknown dynamic parameters, the problem of controlling the end effector of a passive mechanism along a desired trajectory using an active robot. This problem represents a large class of important practical applications involving motion control of complex mechanisms or mobile environments. Opening a door, turning a crank, as well as more complex problems in industrial settings belong to this class. The controlled mechanism has its own nonlinear dynamics which are generally unknown. The research will concentrate on transient performance of the control algorithms, and on trade-offs between joint space and Cartesian space formulations.
