Distributed Real-Time Adaptive Control of Mechanical Arms with Practical Implementation.

Adaptive controllers employing the highly coupled and non-linear dynamics of robot manipulators are computationally complex, which present a major obstacle in their real-time implementation for industrial applications. This paper describes a solution to the problem by employing a parallel processing approach. The parallelism inherent in the adaptive controllers is exploited to obtain an efficient implementation and reduce the overall computation time to within the limit acceptable for real-time control. The distributed globally stable adaptive controller is implemented on a network of T-800 TRANSPUTERS FOR THE SIX JOINT puma 560 arm.