Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 May 2014
In this paper we propose new tuning conditions for three saturated nonlinear proportional-integral-derivative (PID) global regulators with bounded torques for robot manipulators, which have been presented previously in the literature. The motivation of this work relies on the fact that the tuning conditions presented previously in the literature for assuring global asymptotic stability are so restrictive that it had been impossible, until now, to carry out experimental tests. New tuning criteria of unsaturated PID controllers for robot manipulators with stability conditions more relaxed than those presented previously in the literature have been proposed recently in some works by the authors. This was achieved by setting the stability conditions as expressions that have to be satisfied at each joint instead of general conditions for the whole robot. Based on this idea, we now obtain stability conditions for saturated global PID controllers which are so relaxed that they have allowed to perform, by the first time, experimental tests using controller gains which completely satisfy the proposed stability conditions. The results of such experiments are presented in this paper, where we have used a two-degrees-of-freedom robot manipulator.