This paper proposes an adaptive control for a class of nonlinear mechanisms with guaranteed transient and steady-state performance. A performance function characterizing the convergence rate, maximum overshoot, and steady-state error is used for the output error transformation, such that stabilizing the transformed system is sufficient to achieve the tracking control of the original system with a priori prescribed performance. A continuously differentiable friction model is adopted to account for the friction nonlinearities, for which primary model parameters are online updated. A novel high-order neural network with only a scalar weight is developed to approximate unknown nonlinearities and to dramatically diminish the computational costs. Comparative experiments on a turntable servo system are included to verify the reliability and effectiveness.

For parameter identifications of robot systems, most existing works have focused on the estimation veracity, but few works of literature are concerned with the convergence speed. In this paper, we developed a robot control/identification scheme to identify the unknown robot kinematic and dynamic parameters with enhanced convergence rate. Superior to the traditional methods, the information of parameter estimation error was properly integrated into the proposed identification algorithm, such that enhanced estimation performance was achieved. Besides, the Newton-Euler (NE) method was used to build the robot dynamic model, where a singular value decomposition-based model reduction method was designed to remedy the potential singularity problems of the NE regressor. Moreover, an interval excitation condition was employed to relax the requirement of persistent excitation condition for the kinematic estimation. By using the Lyapunov synthesis, explicit analysis of the convergence rate of the tracking errors and the estimated parameters were performed. Simulation studies were conducted to show the accurate and fast convergence of the proposed finite-time (FT) identification algorithm based on a 7-DOF arm of Baxter robot.

Due to strongly coupled nonlinearities of the grasped dual-arm robot and the internal forces generated by grasped objects, the dual-arm robot control with uncertain kinematics and dynamics raises a challenging problem. In this paper, an adaptive fuzzy control scheme is developed for a dual-arm robot, where an approximate Jacobian matrix is applied to address the uncertain kinematic control, while a decentralized fuzzy logic controller is constructed to compensate for uncertain dynamics of the robotic arms and the manipulated object. Also, a novel finite-time convergence parameter adaptation technique is developed for the estimation of kinematic parameters and fuzzy logic weights, such that the estimation can be guaranteed to converge to small neighborhoods around their ideal values in a finite time. Moreover, a partial persistent excitation property of the Gaussian-membership-based fuzzy basis function was established to relax the conventional persistent excitation condition. This enables a designer to reuse these learned weight values in the future without relearning. Extensive simulation studies have been carried out using a dual-arm robot to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

This paper proposes an adaptive control for vehicle active suspensions with unknown nonlinearities (e.g., nonlinear springs and piecewise dampers). A prescribed performance function that characterizes the convergence rate, maximum overshoot, and steady-state error is incorporated into the control design to stabilize the vertical and pitch motions, such that both the transient and steady-state suspension response are guaranteed. Moreover, a novel adaptive law is used to achieve precise estimation of essential parameters (e.g., mass of vehicle body and moment of inertia for pitch motion), where the parameter estimation error is obtained explicitly and then used as a new leakage term. Theoretical studies prove the convergence of the estimated parameters, and compare the suggested controller with generic adaptive controllers using the gradient descent and e-modification schemes. In addition to motion displacements, dynamic tire loads and suspension travel constraints are also considered. Extensive comparative simulations on a dynamic simulator consisting of commercial vehicle simulation software Carsim 8.1 and MATLAB Simulink are provided to show the efficacy of the proposed control, and to illustrate the improved performance.