Presidential Young Investigator Award: Nonlinear and Adaptive Systems, Robotics

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With the advent of recent advances in VLSI prototyping, it is now practical to think about the implementation of rather complicated, computationally intensive, adaptive, time-varying, and non-linear control schemes. Such schemes are a matter of necessity in the control of new generation aircraft, submarines, missiles, and robot manipulators which have rather severe nonlinearities in their dynamics. In this research, methodologies for adaptive, linear, and nonlinear control systems are examined which will generate algorithms that can later be implemented in custom VLSI format. One specific application which will be of focal interest to the work will be the real-time control of robot manipulators. The advantages of focusing on the application to robot manipulators are two: First, manipulators are available in this laboratory on which to try out the control laws; and second, the dynamics of robots are complicated, non-linear, and imprecisely known, resulting in the necessity for non-linear, adaptive, and pre-view control schemes which make this application a good benchmark for the algorithms.