Robust control for rigid serial manipulators: a general setting

We design a robust control for serial-link mechanical manipulators with revolute and/or prismatic joints. The properties of the inertia matrix are first analyzed. It is shown that the inertia matrix can indeed be used to construct Lyapunov functions, even though some of the joints are prismatic. A robust control is proposed without assuming properties of the manipulator system other than uniform positive definiteness of the inertia matrix. The generic properties of the inertia matrix are also readily applied for other control designs.