Robust tracking control for a class of electrically driven flexible-joint robots without velocity measurements

Abstract

This article addresses the motion tracking control for a class of flexible-joint robotic manipulators actuated by brushed direct current motors. This class of electrically driven flexible-joint robots is perturbed by time-varying parametric uncertainties and external disturbances. A novel observer-based robust dynamic feedback tracking controller without velocity measurements will be developed such that the resulting closed-loop system is locally stable, all the states and signals are bounded and the trajectory tracking errors can be made as small as possible. Only the measurements of link position and armature current are required for feedback and so the number of sensors in the practical implementation of the developed control scheme can be greatly reduced. The observer structure is of reduced order in the sense that the observer is constructed only to estimate the velocity signals and whose dimension is half of the dimension of flexible-joint robots. Especially, for the set-point regulation problem, the developed controller is simplified to a linear time-invariant controller. Consequently, the robust tracking control scheme developed in this study can be extended to handle a broader class of uncertain electrically driven flexible-joint robots and the developed robust control schemes possess the properties of computational simplicity and easy implementation. Finally, simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control algorithms.

Keywords:

• flexible-joint robot
• electrically driven
• robust tracking control
• observer-based controller

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Science Council, Taiwan, R.O.C., under contract NSC 99-2216-E-168-001.