A new output tracking control method for rigid robot manipulators is developed via the combination of adaptive sliding mode control and the compensated inverse dynamics approach. The innovative compensated inverse dynamics approach is applied to rigid robot systems and no estimation of the inertia matrix, which avoids the inverse problem of the time-varying inertia matrix, is involved. The adaptive sliding mode control scheme is used to take into account the unknown but bounded parameter uncertainties and external disturbances. The performance of the proposed control method is demonstrated by simulation.
