Manipulator bath control using SDRE

A controller synthesis based on State Dependent Riccati Equation methods is presented. The methodology is applied to the path control of a slow moving robot manipulator, for the main purpose of method validation. Due to hardware limitations, not all the manipulator joints were controlled, and the resulting gains are obtained off-line using numerical simulation on a model identified via least squares techniques. Satisfactory results were obtained as compared to standard PID and computed torque control methods. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first real hardware application of such controller, which until now has been tested only through simulation.