Adaptive control for networked uncertain cooperative dual-arm manipulators: an event-triggered approach

Abstract

Abstract In this paper, an improved adaptive motion-force control approach is introduced to control the cooperative manipulators transporting a shared object under limited communication. The adaptive controller is designed based on the backstepping approach to control the motion of the handled object in the presence of uncertainties and external disturbances. Moreover, the force controller is established to maintain constant internal forces. An event-triggered (ET) mechanism is derived based on the Lyapunov analysis to deal with the bandwidth restrictions and maintain the system stability during the cooperative manipulation. The effectiveness of the proposed control scheme is investigated by comparing it with the existing variations of adaptive backstepping control (i.e., traditional and state augmented schemes). Moreover, the designed triggering mechanism is compared with different triggering conditions presented in the literature. The proposed control approach is further validated in a more realistic virtual robot experimentation platform (i.e., V-REP) using two SCORBOT-ER VPlus manipulators. From the TrueTime-based simulation runs, the proposed control scheme exhibits superior performance in tandem with efficient utilization of the network resources during the transportation task.