Adaptive control for a cable driven robot arm

The cable-driven mechanism is usually used in robotic systems for the efficient transmission of forces or torques from actuators to the end-effector. However, the control design is challenging for these systems due to the cable compliance and transmission elasticity. In this paper, adaptive control in a cascaded structure is designed for the trajectory tracking of a cable driven robot arm. The desired control input is obtained by developing an adaptation scheme, which does not require the computation of the regressor matrix. Proportional-derivative (PD) control is designed to specify the actual control input such that the trajectory tracking is achieved. Simulation results are provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.