Robust control of electrically driven robots by adaptive fuzzy estimation of uncertainty

This paper presents a novel robust decentralized control of electrically driven robot manipulators by adaptive fuzzy estimation and compensation of uncertainty. The proposed control employs voltage control strategy, which is simpler and more efficient than the conventional strategy, the so-called torque control strategy, due to being free from manipulator dynamics. It is verified that the proposed adaptive fuzzy system can model the uncertainty as a nonlinear function of the joint position error and its time derivative. The adaptive fuzzy system has an advantage that does not employ all system states to estimate the uncertainty. The stability analysis, performance evaluation, and simulation results are presented to verify the effectiveness of the method. A comparison between the proposed Nonlinear Adaptive Fuzzy Control (NAFC) and a Robust Nonlinear Control (RNC) is presented. Both control approaches are robust with a very good tracking performance. The NAFC is superior to the RNC in the face of smooth uncertainty. In contrast, the RNC is superior to the NAFC in the face of sudden changes in uncertainty. The case study is an articulated manipulator driven by permanent magnet dc motors.