A flexible robotic control experiment for teaching nonlinear adaptive control

Teaching a subject on system identification and adaptive control to Master’s students is a challenging task. In view of providing a platform to achieve the teaching-learning on adaptive control effectively, this paper proposes a real-time robotic adaptive control experiment. The robotic system consists of flexible links which is subjected to varied payloads. The link flexure of this robot and other parameters conditions are uncertain thus necessitating an adaptive control to handle the payload variations. A simple regressor-based adaptive control is designed by linear parametric representation of a highly nonlinear and coupled dynamics this robot with flexible links (flexible robot). To reinforce the student’s concept of design, development, and implementation of an adaptive control, experiments were undertaken in real-time for different payloads. Attempts have been made to make the students’ understanding more clear how an adaptive controller performs well for situations with varied parameters which is not possible to obtain by a fixed gain controller.