Periodic Event-Triggered Control for the Stabilization of Robotic Manipulators

This paper proposes a periodic event-triggered control (PETC) design applied to nonlinear robotic systems for joint space stabilization. The update of the control signal is based on a predefined triggering mechanism that periodically considers state measurements. So, continuous state measurements required in the continuous event-triggered control (CETC), are no longer needed in this proposal. The main advantages of the proposal are: 1) to assure the convergence of the closed-loop trajectories to a compact ball centered in the origin of the error space, and 2) the relaxation of continuous measurements for the evaluation of the event condition which implies a more suitable design for real-time implementation purposes. Experimental comparative results of the proposed design with a time-triggered control (TTC) scheme show that the PETC can present suitable performance with a significant reduction of 82.20% of the controller updates mainly given in the steady-state of the closed-loop system. This implies a decrement of the computation resources due to information transfer.