A novel fuzzy logic algorithm for the control of industrial robot manipulators

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the problem of determining the control technique that must be used to ensure robustness and better trajectory tracking for robots. The manipulator system is nonlinear by nature and conventional controllers, whether adaptive or nonadaptive, cannot provide satisfactory results for a wide margin of load variation and speed. The focus of this research is the application of fuzzy logic to design a new control strategy that can easily ensure precision, robustness and good performance in the following of a preplanned trajectory, without requiring neither robot modeling nor a big amount of calculation. A novel fuzzy set control algorithm is presented and simulation results are discussed. The proposed method is applied to control a two-link manipulator handling variable loads and operating under different speeds (high and low). Its superior performance, model and parameter independency, and its relative computational simplicity, make it an attractive controller.