GLOBAL OPTIMAL FEEDBACK-LINEARIZING CONTROL OF ROBOT MANIPULATORS

The present paper offers a new optimal feedback-linearizing control scheme for robot manipulators. The method presented aims at solving a special form of the unconstrained optimal control problem (OCP) of robot manipulators globally using the results of the Lyaponov method and feedback-linearizing strategy and without using the calculus of variations (indirect method), direct methods, or the dynamic programming approach. Most of these methods and their sub-branches yield a local optimal solution for the considered OCP by satisfying some necessary conditions to find the stationary point of the considered cost functional. In addition, the proposed method can be used for both set-point regulating (point-to-point) tasks (e.g. pick-and-place operation or spot welding tasks) and trajectory tracking tasks such as painting or welding tasks. However, the proposed method can not support the physical constraints on robot manipulators and requires precise dynamics of the robot, as well. Instead, it can be used as an on-line optimal control algorithm which produces the optimal solution without performing any kind of optimization algorithms which require time to find the optimal solution.