US-Mexico Cooperative Research: Adaptive Control of Robot Manipulators

该奖项将支持伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳分校的Mark Spong教授与墨西哥国立自治大学（UNAM）的Romeo Ortega博士的一项研究合作。研究人员打算将自适应控制理论技术与机器人动力学的详细研究相结合，重点研究高性能机器人控制问题。将特别强调重要的非刚体动态效应，如关节灵活性，因为众所周知，这些效应会破坏忽略它们的自适应控制算法的稳定性。机器人研究的目标之一是开发所谓的智能机器人，能够根据环境中的不确定性调整自己的行为。实现这一目标将在制造业、空间探索和检查等领域带来重大利益。虽然研究者打算研究机器人自适应运动和力控制中的许多问题，但他们选择了自适应机器人控制中的关节顺应性问题作为他们研究的最初重点。这种顺应性是一个极难解决的开放性问题，其解决将对减少工业机器人的周期时间和提高其有效载荷能力有重要贡献。这次合作，结合了美国研究者在机器人动力学方面的专业知识和墨西哥研究者在自适应控制理论方面的知识，有可能增加我们对机器人操纵器自适应控制的理解。

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.