Practical tracking control under actuator saturation for a class of flexible-joint robotic manipulators driven by DC motors

This paper is devoted to the practical tracking control for a class of flexible-joint robotic manipulators driven by DC motors. Different from the related literature where control constraint is neglected and the disturbances are excluded or only exist in one subsystem, actuator saturation is considered in this paper, while the disturbances are present in all the three subsystems. This leads to the incapability of the traditional schemes on this topic. For this, a novel control design scheme is proposed by skillfully incorporating adaptive dynamic compensation technique, constructive methods of command filters and an auxiliary system for the actuator saturation into the backstepping framework, and in turn to design a practical tracking controller which ensures that all the states of the resulting closed-loop system are bounded and the system output practically tracks the reference signal. It is worthwhile strengthening that a more wider class of reference signals can be tracked since they are only first-order continuously differentiable but twice or more in the related literature. Finally, a numerical example is provided to validate the effectiveness of the proposed theoretical results.