Robust control of rigid-link flexible-joint robots with redundant joint actuators

Presents an approach for designing robust tracking controllers for rigid-link flexible-joint (RLFJ) robot manipulators with redundant actuators in the joints. With the proposed controller, the authors prove that the link tracking error is globally uniformly ultimately bounded (GUUB) in spite of additive bounded disturbances, parametric uncertainty, and other modeling uncertainty. The authors also illustrate how the load at each joint is shared by two actuators. Finally simulation results are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed controller.>