Neuromorphic control of robotic manipulators

A simple decentralized neuromorphic controller (NMC) for multijoint robotic manipulators with unknown dynamics is presented. The control scheme is computationally very fast and amenable to parallel processing implementation. The NMC is employed to generate the proper control torques to achieve a desired trajectory for the manipulator given both the measurements of the current states and the desired values of the current states. The NMC parameters are adjusted online in real time by the popular backpropagation algorithm which minimizes the error between the desired and current plant states. This method is illustrated by several examples where a two-degree-of-freedom robotic manipulator is controlled to a desired trajectory under a variety of conditions.<<ETX>>