Metaheuristic adaptive control based on polynomial regression and differential evolution for robotic manipulators

Adaptive control of systems consists of the online adjustment of their control parameters to deal with parametric uncertainties and disturbances. Indirect Adaptive Control (IAC) of electromechanical systems and robotic manipulators based on metaheuristic optimization has been shown to be competitive compared to other classical and advanced control schemes. In this approach, the identification of system model parameters is stated as an optimization problem and then solved online by metaheuristics. Subsequently, the identified model is used in a second stage of online metaheuristic optimization to predict the system behavior and tune its control parameters. Therefore, this approach can be computationally expensive and unaffordable for systems with more complex dynamics whose models are just as complex. Due to the above, this work proposes an indirect adaptive control method for robotic manipulators based on differential evolution (DE) optimization, which aims to reduce the computational cost of the online identification stage by using Polynomial Regressors (PR) whose adjustment can be performed through a closed-form solution. The proposed method is tested in simulation for a 2 d.o.f. robotic manipulator and the results are compared against the original indirect adaptive control approach based on metaheuristic optimization and also a controller optimized offline. The post-hoc pair-wise Friedman tests confirm that the proposed approach provides competitive results compared to the original approach, with significant savings in computational resources.