A saturation-type robust controller for modular manipulators arms

This paper presents a new robust controller for modular and reconfigurable manipulators that require frequent conversion from one setup to another in industrial applications. The proposed robust controller can be integrated with a typical industrial proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller and only requires the boundaries of the uncertainties of the dynamic parameters of the robotic arm. This makes the proposed controller easy to configure and implement for various setups realized from a reconfigurable robot and guarantees uniform ultimate boundedness of all tracking errors.A numerical analysis is presented to validate the effectiveness of the proposed controller. The performance of the proposed robust controller is compared to that of an independent joint PID controller for two different 3-DOF robotic configurations.