We will describe the dynamics of a robot manipulator using a set of

nonlinear, second-order, ordinary differential equations which depend on

the kinematic and inertial properties of the robot. Although in principle
these equations can be derived by summing all of the forces acting on
the coupled rigid bodies which form the robot, we shall rely instead on
a Lagrangian derivation of the dynamics. This technique has the advan-
tage of requiring only the kinetic and potential energies of the system to
be computed, and hence tends to be less prone to error than summing
together the inertial, Coriolis, centrifugal, actuator, and other forces act-
ing on the robot’s links. It also allows the structural properties of the
dynamics to be determined and exploited.
Once the equations of motion for a manipulator are known, the inverse
problem can be treated: the control of a robot manipulator entails finding
actuator forces which cause the manipulator to move along a given tra-
jectory. If we have a perfect model of the dynamics of the manipulator,
we can find the proper joint torques directly from this model. In practice,
we must design a feedback control law which updates the applied forces
in response to deviations from the desired trajectory. Care is required in
designing a feedback control law to insure that the overall system con-
verges to the desired trajectory in the presence of initial condition errors,
sensor noise, and modeling errors.
In this chapter, we primarily concentrate on one of the simplest robot
control problems, that of regulating the position of the robot. There are
two basic ways that this problem can be solved. The first, referred to as
joint space control, involves converting a given task into a desired path
for the joints of the robot. A control law is then used to determine joint
torques which cause the manipulator to follow the given trajectory. A
different approach is to transform the dynamics and control problem into
the task space, so that the control law is written in terms of the end-
effector position and orientation. We refer to this approach as workspace
control.
A much harder control problem is one in which the robot is in contact
with its environment. In this case, we must regulate not only the position
of the end-effector but also the forces it applies against the environment.
We discuss this problem briefly in the last section of this chapter and defer
a more complete treatment until Chapter 6, after we have introduced the
tools necessary to study constrained systems.

2 Lagrange’s Equations
There are many methods for generating the dynamic equations of a me-
chanical system. All methods generate equivalent sets of equations, but
different forms of the equations may be better suited for computation
or analysis. We will use a Lagrangian analysis for our derivation, which

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