For the trajectory following problem of a robot manipulator, a robust estimation and control scheme which requires only position measurements is proposed to guarantee uniform ultimate bounded stability under significant uncertainties and disturbances in the robot dynamics. The scheme combines a class of robust control laws with a robust estimator where the robust control law can be chosen to be either a modification of the standard computed torque control law or simply a linear and decentralized “PD” control law. The proposed robust estimator is also linear and decentralized for easy implementation. Constructive choices of the gains in the control law and estimator are proposed which depend only on the coefficients of a polynomial bounding function of the unknown dynamics. The asymptotic stability of the tracking errors and the estimation error is also investigated. Experimentation results verify the theoretical analysis.
