Design of a neural internal model control system for a robot

This paper describes the design of an Internal Model Control (IMC) system for a planar two-degree-of-freedom robot. IMC was investigated as an alternative to the basic inverse control scheme which is difficult to implement. The proposed IMC system consisted of a forward internal neural model of the robot, a neural controller and a conventional feedback controller, all of which were realised easily. Both the neural model and the neural controller were based on recurrent networks which were trained using the backpropagation (BP) algorithm. The paper presents the results obtained with two types of recurrent networks as well as a conventional PID system.