The PID controller with constantfeedback gains has withstood as the preferred choice for control of linear plants or linearized plants, and under certain conditions for non-linear ones, where the control of robotic arms excels. In this paper a model-free self-tuning PID controller is proposed for tracking tasks. The key idea is to exploitthe passivity-based formulation for robotic arms in order to shape the damping injection to enforce dissipativity and to guarantee semiglobal exponential convergence in the sense of Lyapunov. It is shown that a neuro-fuzzy network can be used to tune dissipation rate gain through a self-tuning policy of a single gain. Experimental studies are presented to confirm the viability of the proposed approach. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved
