Adaptive control of space robot system based on back-stepping design

An adaptive control scheme is developed for the tracking control of space robots with an attitude controlled base by combining the back-stepping design approach and adaptive control theory. The proposed adaptive control scheme guarantees that the end-effector's tracking errors converge to zero asymptotically despite the unknown inertial parameters. Compared with the previous results, the proposed one can eliminate the cross term contained in the derivative of Lyapunov function, and hence improve the tracking performance. Simulation results for a two-link planar space robot show the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.