Adaptive strategies in constrained manipulation

Earlier work (Slotine and Li, 1986) demonstrates that using state feedback to directly modify a manipulator's energy function, rather than its fully expanded dynamics, represents a powerful approach to robot control, and, in particular, yields a simple globally convergent adaptive algorithm for trajectory control problems. An important practical feature of the algorithm is that is does not require measurements or estimates of the manipulator's joint accelerations. This paper rewrites the approach in term of end-effector dynamics, extends it to hybrid motion/force control, and discusses adaptive strategies involving mobile environments, such as the external motion control of an unknown passive mechanism.