Adaptive Proportional Derivative Controller of Cooperative Manipulators

This study deals with the design of an automatic controller to solve the problem of trajectory tracking for collaborative robot manipulators. The control algorithm corresponds to an adaptive proportional derivative controller (APDC) aimed to reduce the needed energy to execute the tracking of some predefined reference trajectories. The controller was designed with the aim of keeping a constant distance between the final effectors of both manipulators. The derivative estimation used in the APDC was obtained by a set of robust exact differentiators based on the application of the super-twisting algorithm (STA). The controller was tested on two real cooperative multi-articulated robotic manipulators system. The experimental setup consisted of two robot manipulators designed with four degrees of freedom each one constructed by the 3D printing technology. The experimental results included comparisons with respect to the classical non-adaptive proportional-derivative controllers. The superior performance of the adaptive controller proposed in this study was confirmed by the estimation of the least mean square analysis of the tracking error.