A
neuroadaptive control scheme for elastic-joint robots is proposed that uses
a relatively small neural network. Stability is achieved through standard
Lyapunov techniques. For added performance, robust modifications are made to
both the control law and the weight update law to
compensate for only approximate learning of the dynamics. The estimate
of the modeling error used in the robust terms is
taken directly from the error of the network in modeling
the dynamics at the currant state. The neural network used
is the CMAC-RBF Associative Memory (CRAM), which is a modification
of Albus's CMAC network and can be used for robots
with elastic degrees of freedom. This results in a scheme
that is computationally practical and results in good performance.