Adaptive tracking control of flexible‐joint manipulators without overparametrization

In this paper, an adaptive controller is designed for rigid‐link flexible‐joint robot manipulators based on link and actuator position measurements only. It is based on the adaptive integrator backstepping method and the link and actuator velocity filters are used to estimate the unknown velocity terms. Moreover, the proposed controller exploits the estimate of the joint stiffness matrix inverse to overcome the overparametrization problem, which has been a significant drawback in adaptive partial state feedback controllers. It achieves asymptotic tracking of link positions while keeping all states and signals bounded. The tracking capability of the presented method is shown through simulation results of one‐ and two‐link flexible joint manipulators.