Adaptive robust control for servo manipulators

In this paper, an adaptive robust control scheme is developed which is suitable for the control of a class of uncertain nonlinear systems, typical of many servo manipulators. The control scheme is comprised of a model reference adaptive controller (MRAC) augmented with a nonlinear compensator based on an adaptive radial basis function (RBF). The RBF compensator is used to neutralise the effects of uncertain and possibly nonlinear dynamics, so that the equivalent system as seen by the MRAC is reduced to one without significant unstructured modelling errors. A stability analysis is provided to show the uniform stability and the asymptotic tracking capabilities of the proposed control system. Real-time experiment results verify the effectiveness of the control scheme.