Prescribed Performance Control for Uncertain Flexible-joint Robotic Manipulators Driven by DC Motors

This paper is devoted to the prescribed performance control for a class of flexible-joint robotic manipulators driven by DC motors. Remarkably, certain transient performances are given aforehand which are jointly considered with some steady ones and hence result into the incapability of traditional control methods on this topic. Moreover, more serious uncertainties are allowed than those of the related literature due to the consideration of the dynamics of joint and motor which introduce essential obstacles in the control design. For this, by using the vectorial backstepping method and the constructive method based on funnel set, a novel prescribed performance control framework is established, and in turn one time-varying controller is explicitly designed which guarantee all the closed-loop system signals are bounded, and particularly, the system output tracks the given reference signal with prescribed accuracy and regulation time. A simulation example is provided to validate the effectiveness of the proposed theoretical results.