Abstract
This paper is concerned with a robust model following controller for nonlinear mechanical systems.
The most basic and important scheme for model following control of a nonlinear mechanical system, such as a manipulator arm, is nonlinear compensation method. In practice, it is very important to consider the robustuess of the controller.
It is well known that the adaptive control scheme and the VSS control scheme have a nature of robustness. But, it is a problem that the adaptive control scheme applied to a mechanical system can't guarantee the global asymptotic stability of the whole system, or the resulting controller is too complicated. On the other hand, the main drawback of the VSS approach is that the resulting control function is discontinuous and, consequently, the mechanical vibration might be caused by the control input.
In this paper, we show that, for nonlinear mechanical systems, the Robust Model Following Control System which has a continuous control law can be easily constructed, using an effective expression of the dynamical model of a controlled object. The design method is based on the Liapunov's second method.
