Adaptive Control of Robot Manipulators

Authors An-Chyau Huang and Ming-Chih Chien (National Taiwan U. of Science and Technology, Taiwan) state in their preface that they have written this text for postgraduate students in an advanced course pertaining to the control of robot manipulators, and for researchers and practicing engineers "who currently employ the regressor-based algorithms but would benefit significantly from the use of the regressor-free strategies." Robot manipulators involved with slow-motion operations are not uncommon as of the last few decades, but getting fast performance requires a completely different level of complexity and advanced control strategies. This work considers actuator dynamics, joint flexibility, and system uncertainties that are assumed to be time-varying, with unknown variation bounds. "The main tool used in this new design is the function approximation technique which represents the general uncertainties in the robot model as finite combinations of basis functions weighted with unknown constant coefficients." Annotation c2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)