ADAPTIVE CONTROL OF MANIPULATORS WITH IMPROVED ADAPTATION TRANSIENTS BY USING ON-LINE SUPERVISION OF THE FREE-PARAMETERS OF THE ADAPTATION ALGORITHM AND OF THE SAMPLING RATE

An adaptive control scheme for mechanical manipulators is proposed. The control loop essentially consists of a network for learning the robot's inverse dynamics and on-line generating the control signal. Some simulation results are provided to evaluate the design. A supervisor is used to improve the performances of the system during the adaptation transients. The supervisor exerts two supervisory actions. The first one consists basically of updating the free-design adaptive controller parameters so that the value of a quadratic loss function is maintained sufficiently small. Such a function involves past tracking errors and their predictions both on appropriate time hori- zons of low performances during the adaptation transients. The supervisor exerts two supervisory actions. The second supervisory action consists basically of a on-line adjustment of the sampling period within an interval centered in a nominal value of the sampling period. The sampling period is selected so that the transient of the tracking error is improved according to the simple intuitive rule of using a sampling rate faster as the tracking error changes faster.