Adaptive practical fixed-time tracking control with prescribed performance for robotic manipulators

Abstract

Robotic manipulators often suffer from insufficient positioning accuracy due to dynamic uncertainties, while existing control algorithms struggle to simultaneously achieve fast response and high tracking precision and often rely on complex dynamic models that demand excessive computational power, hindering practical onboard deployment. To address these issues, we propose an advanced real-time capable onboard tracking controller for robotic manipulators with dynamic uncertainties, which can balance the overall control performance, computational complexity, and parameter setting. The controller is suitable for direct implementation on embedded hardware with limited computational resources, without requiring heavy dynamics computation or learning approximation. First, a model-free adaptive time-delay estimator is designed to estimate and compensate for the lumped dynamic uncertainties of the robotic manipulator, where the gain matrix is directly updated by the magnitude of the sliding mode variable of tracking error for excellent overall performance. Then, an adaptive fixed-time nonsingular terminal sliding mode controller with prescribed performance is developed to stabilize the tracking errors of the robotic manipulator in a predefined fixed time. The controller parameters determine an upper bound of the fixed convergence time through analytically derived expressions, where the actual settling time is automatically ensured regardless of the initial conditions. The fast response and accurate steady-state tracking are also guaranteed by the prescribed performance, such that the processing quality and efficiency of the robotic manipulator during real-time operation tasks can be improved. Moreover, the adaptive updating law for the tracking controller gain is designed to achieve fixed-time stability of the entire closed-loop states without the requirement of an exact upper bound of dynamic uncertainties or estimation errors. The proposed tracking control scheme for robotic manipulators is easy to implement owing to the convenient parameter setting and low computational burden, and its effectiveness is verified by simulations and experiments.

Keywords

Adaptive time-delay estimation / Adaptive fixed-time control / Dynamic uncertainties / Prescribed performance / Robotic manipulator / Tracking control

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The Authors. Published by Zhejiang University Press Co., Ltd.