Abstract
We propose a new method for controlling rigid robot manipulators guaranteeing that a user-defined tracking performance is ultimately met while facing uncertain system dynamics and input disturbance. Our control approach is based on the passivity-based control technique and eliminates the limitations of existing methods (e.g. impractical tuning to avoid chattering and difficult estimation of uncertainty bounds of disturbances) through the use of interval arithmetic. Our controller guarantees to meet the tracking performance when considering input disturbance with unknown bounds. Additionally, our approach can be used for on-the-fly controller synthesis, which makes it especially appealing for robust control of modular and reconfigurable robot manipulators. Finally, we present simulation results and a comparison with the r-α tracking controller that shows the superior performance of our proposed method when considering a realistic scenario with limited sampling rate. © 2016 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.