After the enthusiasm for creating “intelligent robots” in the early 1980's, progress of robotics research in the past decade has not fulfilled our expectations but revealed various difficulties in understanding motor control by man and implementing intelligent functions in robotic machines. To regain the initiative in the development of intelligent machines, this paper first presents a critical review of the state of the art of robot control and points out the necessity for improving robot servo-loops in order to facilitate skilled and dexterious motions in robotic manipulators and mechanical hands. It is then shown that the introduction of a quasi-natural potential in Lagrange's formulation of robot dynamics gives rise to the design of hyperstable PID servo-loops, which establish global asymptotic stability of set-point control. The hyperstability theoretical framework is then applied to the design of control commands in various control problems, such as hybrid (position/force) control, impedance control, model-based adaptive control, and learning control. In all cases, the passivity concept of residual robot dynamics plays a vital role in conjunction with the concept of feedback connections of two hyperstable nonlinear or linear blocks.
