In this paper, an application of a non-linear H∞ control law for an industrial robot manipulator is presented. Control of the manipulator motion is formulated into a non-linear H∞ optimization problem, namely optimal tracking performance in the presence of modelling uncertainties and external disturbances. Analytical solutions for this problem are implemented on a real robot. The robot under consideration is the six-degrees-of-freedom GEC Tetrabot. Investigations are made into the selection of weights for the H∞ controller and it is shown how different selections of weights affect the Tetrabot performance. The authors believe this to be the first robotic application of nonlinear H∞ control. Comparisons of the proposed control strategy with conventional proportional-derivative and proportional-integral-derivative controllers show favourable performance of the Tetrabot under the new non-linear H∞ control scheme.
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