Robust control of robot manipulator with actuators

A Robust controller is designed for cascaded nonlinear uncertain systems that can be decomposed into two subsystems; that is, a series connection of two nonlinear subsystems, such as a robot manipulator with actuators. For such systems, a recursive design is used to include the second subsystem in the robust control. The recursive design procedure contains two steps. First, a fictitious robust controller for the first subsystem is designed as if the subsystem had an independent control. As the fictitious control, a nonlinear H-infinity control using energy dissipation is designed in the sense of L-2-gain attenuation from the disturbance caused by system uncertainties to performance vector. Second, the actual robust control is designed recursively by Lyapunov's second method. The designed robust control is applied to a robotic system with actuators, in which the physical control inputs are not the joint torques, but electrical signals to the actuators.