Experimental study on direct adaptive control of a PUMA 560 industrial robot

The paper describes the implementation and experimental validation of a new direct adaptive control scheme on a PUMA 560 industrial robot. The testbed facility consists of a Unimation PUMA 560 six-jointed robot and controller, and a DEC MicroVAX II computer which hosts the RCCL (Robot Control "C" Library) software. The control algorithm is implemented on the MicroVAX which acts as a digital controller for the PUMA robot, and the Unimation controller is effectively bypassed and used merely as an I/O device to interface the MicroVAX to the joint motors. The control algorithm for each robot joint consists of an auxiliary signal generated by a constant-gain PID controller, and an adaptive position-velocity (PD) feedback controller with adjustable gains. The adaptive independent joint controllers compensate for the inter-joint couplings and achieve accurate trajectory tracking without the need for the complex dynamic model and parameter values of the robot. Extensive experimental results on PUMA joint control are presented to confirm the feasibility of the proposed scheme, in spite of strong interactions between joint motions. Experimental results validate the capabilities of the proposed control scheme. The control scheme is extremely simple and computationally very fast for concurrent processing with high sampling rates.