Adaptive Command-Filtered Backstepping Control of Robot Arms With Compliant Actuators

Compliant actuators are significant for safe physical human–robot interaction. Series elastic actuator (SEA) is the most popular type of compliant actuators, which possesses several attractive features, such as low output impedance, back drivability, shock tolerance, smooth force transmission, and energy efficiency. This brief focuses on the adaptive command-filtered backstepping control (CFBC) design for robot arms driven by SEAs. The CFBC alleviates the complexity problem in integrator backstepping control and has attracted great attention. However, experimental results of adaptive CFBC have not been reported. In this brief, a simplified adaptive CFBC framework is developed for robot arms driven by SEAs, where discontinuous friction is compensated for by an adaptive mechanism. Closed-loop stability is rigorously established by the Lyapunov synthesis and time-scales separation. Experimental results based on a singlelink SEA-driven robot arm have been provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.