Adaptive Tracking Control for Robots with Unknown Kinematic and Dynamic Properties

It has been almost two decades since the first globally tracking convergent adaptive controllers were derived for robot with dynamic uncertainties. However, the problem of concurrent adaptation to both kinematic and dynamic uncertainties has never been systematically solved. This is the subject of this paper. We derive a new adaptive Jacobian controller for trajectory tracking of robot with uncertain kinematics and dynamics. It is shown that the robot end effector is able to converge to a desired trajectory with the uncertain kinematics and dynamics parameters being updated online by parameter update laws. The algorithm requires only to measure the end-effector position, besides the robot’s joint angles and joint velocities. The proposed controller can also be extended to adaptive visual tracking control with uncertain camera parameters, taking into consideration the uncertainties of the nonlinear robot kinematics and dynamics. Experimental results are presented to illustrate the performance of the proposed controllers. In the experiments, we demonstrate that the robot’s shadow can be used to control the robot.