Robust tracking control for a class of flexible-joint time-delay robots using only position measurements

Abstract

In this paper, robust tracking control is investigated for a class of uncertain flexible-joint robots with time delays and time-varying perturbations. By employing the Lyapunov--Krasovskii functional technique and backstepping design technique, a novel robust tracking control scheme using only position measurements is developed such that all the states and signals of the closed-loop flexible-joint time-delay robot system remain bounded and the tracking error can asymptotically converge to a small neighbourhood around the origin. By appropriately choosing the weighting gains in the Lyapunov–Krasovskii functionals, the circular phenomenon in the controller design is overcome. Due to suitably designing the velocity observer and the virtual control input, the link-side dynamics does not need to be incorporated into the actuator-side tracking error dynamics, and so the complexity in the backstepping design is avoided. Consequently, we can easily construct the Lyapunov–Krasovskii functionals, and, in turn, the robust tracking control scheme developed here is a linear time-varying controller and can be simply implemented. Simulation examples are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control algorithm.