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We design a regulation-triggered adaptive controller for robot manipulators to efficiently estimate unknown parameters and to achieve asymptotic stability in the presence of coupled uncertainties. Robot manipulators are widely used in telemanipulation systems where they are subject to model and environmental uncertainties. Using conventional control algorithms on such systems can cause not only poor control performance, but also expensive computational costs and catastrophic instabilities. Therefore, system uncertainties need to be estimated through designing a computationally efficient adaptive control law. We focus on robot manipulators as an example of a highly nonlinear system. As a case study, a 2-DOF manipulator subject to four parametric uncertainties is investigated. First, the dynamic equations of the manipulator are derived, and the corresponding regressor matrix is constructed for the unknown parameters. For a general nonlinear system, a theorem is presented to guarantee the asymptotic stability of the system and the convergence of parameters’ estimations. Finally, simulation results are discussed for a two-link manipulator, and the performance of the proposed scheme is thoroughly evaluated.

In this paper, we examine the autonomous operation of a high-DOF robot manipulator. We investigate a pick-and-place task where the position and orientation of an object, an obstacle, and a target pad are initially unknown and need to be autonomously determined. In order to complete this task, we employ a combination of computer vision, deep learning, and control techniques. First, we locate the center of each item in two captured images utilizing HSV-based scanning. Second, we utilize stereo vision techniques to determine the 3D position of each item. Third, we implement a Convolutional Neural Network in order to determine the orientation of the object. Finally, we use the calculated 3D positions of each item to establish an obstacle avoidance trajectory lifting the object over the obstacle and onto the target pad. Through the results of our research, we demonstrate that our combination of techniques has minimal error, is capable of running in real-time, and is able to reliably perform the task. Thus, we demonstrate that through the combination of specialized autonomous techniques, generalization to a complex autonomous task is possible.