An Adaptive Evolutionary Switching Control for Robot Manipulators

In this paper, a new adaptive switching control approach, called adaptive evolutionary switching PD control (AES-PD), is proposed for iterative operations of robot manipulators. The proposed AES-PD control method is a combination of the feedback of PD control with gain switching and feedforward using the input torque profile obtained from the previous iteration. The asymptotic convergence of the AES-PD control method is theoretically proved using Lyapunov’s method. The philosophy of the switching control strategy is interpreted in the context of the iteration domain to increase the speed of the convergence for trajectory tracking of robot manipulators. The AES-PD control has a simple control structure that makes it easily implemented. The validity of the proposed control scheme is demonstrated for the trajectory tracking of robot manipulators through simulation studies. Simulation results show that the AES-PD control can improve the tracking performance with an increase of the iteration number. The EAS-PD control method has the adaptive and learning ability; therefore, it should be very attractive to applications of industrial robot control.