A passivity based control methodology for flexible joint robots with application to a simplified shuttle RMS arm

The main goal is to develop a general theory for the control of flexible robots, including flexible joint robots, flexible link robots, rigid bodies with flexible appendages, etc. As part of the validation, the theory is applied to the control law development for a test example which consists of a three-link arm modeled after the shoulder yaw joint of the space shuttle remote manipulator system (RMS). The performance of the closed loop control system is then compared with the performance of the existing RMS controller to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The theoretical foundation of this new approach to the control of flexible robots is presented and its efficacy is demonstrated through simulation results on the three-link test arm

Passivity/Lyapunov based controller design for trajectory tracking of flexible joint manipulators

A passivity and Lyapunov based approach for the control design for the trajectory tracking problem of flexible joint robots is presented. The basic structure of the proposed controller is the sum of a model-based feedforward and a model-independent feedback. Feedforward selection and solution is analyzed for a general model for flexible joints, and for more specific and practical model structures. Passivity theory is used to design a motor state-based controller in order to input-output stabilize the error system formed by the feedforward. Observability conditions for asymptotic stability are stated and verified. In order to accommodate for modeling uncertainties and to allow for the implementation of a simplified feedforward compensation, the stability of the system is analyzed in presence of approximations in the feedforward by using a Lyapunov based robustness analysis. It is shown that under certain conditions, e.g., the desired trajectory is varying slowly enough, stability is maintained for various approximations of a canonical feedforward

A family of asymptotically stable control laws for flexible robots based on a passivity approach

A general family of asymptotically stabilizing control laws is introduced for a class of nonlinear Hamiltonian systems. The inherent passivity property of this class of systems and the Passivity Theorem are used to show the closed-loop input/output stability which is then related to the internal state space stability through the stabilizability and detectability condition. Applications of these results include fully actuated robots, flexible joint robots, and robots with link flexibility

On Observer-Based Control of Nonlinear Systems

Filtering and reconstruction of signals play a fundamental role in modern signal processing, telecommunications, and control theory and are used in numerous applications. The feedback principle is an important concept in control theory. Many different control strategies are based on the assumption that all internal states of the control object are available for feedback. In most cases, however, only a few of the states or some functions of the states can be measured. This circumstance raises the need for techniques, which makes it possible not only to estimate states, but also to derive control laws that guarantee stability when using the estimated states instead of the true ones. For linear systems, the separation principle assures stability for the use of converging state estimates in a stabilizing state feedback control law. In general, however, the combination of separately designed state observers and state feedback controllers does not preserve performance, robustness, or even stability of each of the separate designs. In this thesis, the problems of observer design and observer-based control for nonlinear systems are addressed. The deterministic continuous-time systems have been in focus. Stability analysis related to the Positive Real Lemma with relevance for output feedback control is presented. Separation results for a class of nonholonomic nonlinear systems, where the combination of independently designed observers and state-feedback controllers assures stability in the output tracking problem are shown. In addition, a generalization to the observer-backstepping method where the controller is designed with respect to estimated states, taking into account the effects of the estimation errors, is presented. Velocity observers with application to ship dynamics and mechanical manipulators are also presented

Control of flexible joint robotic manipulator using tuning functions design

The goal of this thesis is to design the controller for a single arm manipulator having a flexible joint for the tracking problem in two different cases. A controller is designed for a deterministic case wherein the plant parameters are assumed to be known while another is designed for an adaptive case where all the plant parameters are assumed to be unknown. In general the tracking problem is; given a smooth reference trajectory, the end effector has to track the reference while maintaining the stability. It is assumed that only the output of the manipulator, which is the link angle, is available for measurement. Also without loss of generality, the fast dynamics, that is the dynamics of the driver side of the system are neglected for the sake of simplicity; In the first case, the design procedure adopted is called observer backstepping. Since the states of the system are unavailable for measurement, an observer is designed that estimates the system states. These estimates are fed to the controller which in turn produces the control input to the system; The second case employs a design procedure called tuning functions design. In this case, since the plant parameters are unknown, the observer designed in case one cannot be used for determining the state estimates. For this purpose, parameter update laws and filters are designed for estimation of plant parameters. The filters employed are k-filters. The k-filters and the parameter update laws are given as input to the controller, which generates the control input to the system; For both cases, the mathematical models are simulated using Matlab/Simulink, and the results are verified

Survey of robust control for rigid robots

Current approaches to the robust control of the motion of rigid robots are surveyed, and the available literature is summarized. The five major design approaches discussed are the linear-multivariable approach, the passivity approach, the variable-structure approach, the saturation approach, and the robust-adaptive approach. Some guidelines for choosing a method are offered

Control of Flexible Joint Robots: A Survey

Coordinated Science Laboratory was formerly known as Control Systems LaboratoryNational Science Foundation / NSF INT 8902476University of Illinois Manufacturing Research CenterUniversity of Illinois Research Boar

Joint-Level Control of the DLR Lightweight Robot SARA

Lightweight robots are known to be intrinsically elastic in their joints. The established classical approaches to control such systems are mostly based on motor-side coordinates since the joints are comparatively stiff. However, that inevitably introduces errors in the coordinates that actually matter: the ones on the link side. Here we present a new joint-torque controller that uses feedback of the link-side positions. Passivity during interaction with the environment is formally shown as well as asymptotic stability of the desired equilibrium in the regulation case. The performance of the control approach is experimentally validated on DLR’s new generation of lightweight robots, namely the SARA robot, which enables this step from motor-side-based to link-sided-based control due to sensors with higher resolution and improved sampling rate