Time Delay Control for Robot Manipulators With Prescribed Performance

This letter proposes a novel prescribed performance time delay control (PTDC) strategy for trajectory tracking in robot manipulators with uncertain dynamics. By integrating prescribed performance control (PPC) into the time delay control (TDC) framework, the proposed PTDC ensures prescribed performance, featuring bounded transient behavior with low overshoot and improved steady-state accuracy, without requiring detailed knowledge of system dynamics. The control algorithm features a simple structure, low computational overhead, and easy deployment on real-time robotic platforms. Lyapunov’s stability theory and Barbalat’s lemma are applied to rigorously prove global asymptotic stability and prescribed performance guarantees. Both simulations and SCARA robot experiments demonstrate that PTDC significantly outperforms existing TDC schemes in position tracking accuracy and transient performance.