One of the results of a research project on mechatronics is a mobile robot, which was used as a carrier for research on the design of mechatronical systems. This mobile robot, the Mobile Autonomous Robot Twente (MART), is intended to be used as major part of a future assembly factory. In this paper the implementation on the MART-robot of a hybrid controller for stabilization of non-holonomic systems is described. Limitations of the physical model of the mechanical structure of the MART-robot lead to a number of practical problems. An interesting result given in the paper is the insight obtained into the geometrical meaning of different parameters of the controller, which allowed considerable improvements in the performance of the controller on the actual mobile robot.>

Passivity-based control methods for robots, which achieve the control objective by reshaping the robot system's natural energy via state feedback, have, from a practical point of view, some very attractive properties. However, the poor quality of velocity measurements may significantly deteriorate the control performance of these methods. In this paper the authors propose a design strategy that utilizes the passivity concept in order to develop combined controller-observer systems for robot motion control using position measurements only. To this end, first a desired energy function for the closed-loop system is introduced, and next the controller-observer combination is constructed such that the closed-loop system matches this energy function, whereas damping is included in the controller- observer system to assure asymptotic stability of the closed-loop system. A key point in this design strategy is a fine tuning of the controller and observer structure to each other, which provides solutions to the output-feedback robot control problem that are conceptually simple and easily implementable in industrial robot applications. Experimental tests on a two-DOF manipulator system illustrate that the proposed controller-observer systems enable the achievement of higher performance levels compared to the frequently used practice of numerical position differentiation for obtaining a velocity estimate.>

A globally convergent adaptive control scheme for robot motion control with the following features is proposed. First, the adaptation law possesses enhanced robustness with respect to noisy velocity measurements. Second, the controller does not require the inclusion of high gain loops that may excite the unmodeled dynamics and amplify the noise level. Third, we derive for the unknown parameter design a relationship between compensator gains and closed-loop convergence rates that is independent of the robot task. A simulation example of a two-DOF manipulator featuring some aspects of the control scheme is given.>

The authors propose a globally convergent adaptive control scheme for robot motion control with the following features: first, the adaptation law processes enhanced robustness with respect to noisy velocity measurements; secondly, the controller does not require the inclusion of high-gain loops that may excite the unmodeled dynamics and amplify the noise level; thirdly the authors derive for the known parameter design a relationship between compensator gains and closed-loop convergence rates which is independent of the robot task. This helps the designer to carry out the gain tuning with an analysis of the robustness-performance tradeoff.>