Composite cooperative synchronization and decentralized learning of multi-robot manipulators with heterogeneous nonlinear uncertain dynamics

Abstract This paper studies the problem of composite synchronization and learning of multiple coordinated robot manipulators subject to heterogeneous nonlinear uncertain dynamics under the leader-follower framework. A new two-layer distributed adaptive learning control scheme is proposed, which consists of the first-layer distributed cooperative estimator and the second-layer decentralized deterministic learning controller. The first layer aims to enable each robotic agent to estimate the leader’s information. The second layer is responsible for not only controlling each individual robotic agent to track over desired reference trajectory, but also accurately identifying/learning each robot’s nonlinear uncertain dynamics. Design and implementation of this two-layer distributed controller can be carried out in a fully-distributed manner, which do not require any global information including global connectivity of the communication network. The Lyapunov method is applied to rigorously analyze stability and parameter convergence of the resulting closed-loop system. Numerical simulations on a team of two-degree-of-freedom robot manipulators have been conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed results.