Adaptive distributed cooperation controller for multiple manipulators

This paper presents a general approach for adaptively and distributively controlling multiple cooperative manipulators. The proposed approach does not adopt a centralized architecture but assigns a controller to each robot. Any communication requirement is determined by motion constraints existing in the cooperative system. All physical parameters of the manipulators or the load of the system are online estimated by a model-based adaptive algorithm. A Lyapunov function guarantees asymptotic convergence of trading errors of the trajectory and the interactive force among the robots. Performance of this controller is further shown by simulations on six DOF manipulators.