Adaptive Cooperative Control of Dual-Arm Robots Using RBF-ADP with Event-Triggering Mechanism

High-precision cooperative control of dual-arm manipulators faces significant challenges arising from complex dynamic coupling, parametric uncertainties, and external disturbances. Furthermore, in networked control scenarios, communication bandwidth and computational resources are inevitably constrained. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel composite control framework that integrates adaptive dynamic programming (ADP) with active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) under a static event-triggering mechanism (SETM). First, to handle model uncertainties and external perturbations, a smooth nonlinear extended state observer (ESO) based on continuous fractional-power functions is developed. This observer guarantees finite-time convergence of the disturbance estimation without inducing the high-frequency chattering inherent in conventional sliding-mode observers. Second, leveraging the disturbance-compensated dynamics, a radial basis function (RBF) neural network-based ADP controller is designed to learn the optimal control policy online, thereby minimizing a quadratic performance index without requiring accurate model knowledge. Third, to improve resource utilization, a static event-triggering strategy is introduced to schedule control updates based on the system state and tracking error. Extensive simulation studies on a 3-DoF dual-arm system demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves superior trajectory tracking accuracy and disturbance robustness while significantly reducing the communication frequency compared to time-triggered approaches.