A trajectory following time delay contoller and its application to robot manipulator control.

This paper focuses on the control of systems with unknown dynamics and deals with a class of systems described by (d/dt) x=ƒ (x, t) +h (x, t) +B (x, t) u+d (t) where h (x, t) and d (t) are unknown dynamics and unexpected disturbances, respectively. Under the assumption of accesibility to all the state variables and their derivatives, Time Delay Control (TDC) has been proposed in our previous paper, based on model reference design approach. This paper first proposes the extended TDC scheme based on trajectory following design approach. The control system's stability, structure and trajectory following property is then discussed for linear-timeinvariant and single-input-single-output systems. Finally, the control performance is evaluated through experiments using a two degree-of-freedom, direct-drive robot manipulator. The theoretical and experimental results indicate that this control method shows excellent robustness properties to unknown dynamics and disturbances based on a very simple control algorithm using time delay.