Robot Control by Using the Concept of Passivity

Mechanical systems such as robots are known to possess inherent dissipative properties. With the proper choice of inputs and outputs, a mechanical system is passive. This then leads to a large class of stabilizing controllers which require virtually no model information for their implementation. Additional model information can be used for performance enhancement through tuning the feedback system and constructing a feedforward system based on the inverse dynamics, without adversely affecting the stability. This paper describes this general passivity/inverse-dynamics approach to robot control. Applications to rigid robots, multiple robots, flexible joint robots, and flexible link robots, are discussed.