US-Mexico Cooperative Research: Adaptive Control of Robot Manipulators

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This award will support Professor Mark Spong of the University of Illinois-Urbana in a research collaboration with Dr. Romeo Ortega of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma (UNAM) de Mexico. The investigators intend to combine techniques of adaptive control theory together with detailed studies of robot dynamics to focus on the problem of high performance robot control. Special emphasis will be placed on important non-rigid body dynamic effects, such as joint flexibility, because these effects are well known to destabilize adaptive control algorithms that ignore them. One of the goals of robotics research is to develop so-called intelligent robots capable of adapting their behavior to uncertainties present in the environment. Achieving this goal would lead to important benefits in areas such as manufacturing, space exploration and inspection. While the investigators intend to investigate a number of issues in adaptive motion and force control of robots, they have chosen as the initial focus of their research the problem of joint compliance in adaptive robot control. Such compliance is an extremely difficult open problem, whose solution would be a significant contribution towards decreasing cycle time and increasing the payload capacity of industrial robots. This collaboration, combining the expertise of the U.S. investigator in robot dynamics with the knowledge of the Mexican investigator in adaptive control theory, has the potential to increase our understanding of adaptive controls of robot manipulators.