Adaptive servo control for umbilical mating

Robotic applications at Kennedy Space Center are unique and in many cases require the fime positioning of heavy loads in dynamic environments. Performing such operations is beyond the capabilities of an off-the-shelf industrial robot. Therefore Robotics Applications Development Laboratory at Kennedy Space Center has put together an integrated system that coordinates state of the art robotic system providing an excellent easy to use testbed for NASA sensor integration experiments. This paper reviews the ways of improving the dynamic response of the robot operating under force feedback with varying dynamic internal perturbations in order to provide continuous stable operations under variable load conditions. The goal is to improve the stability of the system with force feedback using the adaptive control feature of existing system over a wide range of random motions. The effect of load variations on the dynamics and the transfer function (order or values of the parameters) of the system has been investigated, more accurate models of the system have been determined and analyzed

Thermal diagnostic of the Optical Window on board LISA Pathfinder

Vacuum conditions inside the LTP Gravitational Reference Sensor must comply with rather demanding requirements. The Optical Window (OW) is an interface which seals the vacuum enclosure and, at the same time, lets the laser beam go through for interferometric Metrology with the test masses. The OW is a plane-parallel plate clamped in a Titanium flange, and is considerably sensitive to thermal and stress fluctuations. It is critical for the required precision measurements, hence its temperature will be carefully monitored in flight. This paper reports on the results of a series of OW characterisation laboratory runs, intended to study its response to selected thermal signals, as well as their fit to numerical models, and the meaning of the latter. We find that a single pole ARMA transfer function provides a consistent approximation to the OW response to thermal excitations, and derive a relationship with the physical processes taking place in the OW. We also show how system noise reduction can be accomplished by means of that transfer function.Comment: 20 pages, 14 figures; accepted for publication in Class. Quantum Gra

Slow sound laser in lined flow ducts

We consider the propagation of sound in a waveguide with an impedance wall. In the low frequency regime, the first effect of the impedance is to decrease the propagation speed of acoustic waves. Therefore, a flow in the duct can exceed the wave propagation speed at low Mach numbers, making it effectively supersonic. We analyze a setup where the impedance along the wall varies such that the duct is supersonic then subsonic in a finite region and supersonic again. In this specific configuration, the subsonic region act as a resonant cavity, and triggers a laser-like instability. We show that the instability is highly subwavelength. Besides, if the subsonic region is small enough, the instability is static. We also analyze the effect of a shear flow layer near the impedance wall. Although its presence significantly alter the instability, its main properties are maintained.Comment: 20 pages, 13 figures. V2: several clarifications added and Fig. 4 adde

Simulation and Analysis of Walking on Compliant Surfaces

abstract: There are a large group of amputees living in the country and the number of them is supposed to increase a lot in the following years. Among them, lower-limb amputees are the majority. In order to improve the locomotion of lower-limb amputees, many prostheses have been developed. Most commercially available prostheses are passive. They can not actively provide pure torque as an intact human could do. Powered prostheses have been the focus during the past decades. Some advanced prostheses have been successful in walking on level ground as well as on inclined surface and climbing stairs. However, not much work has been done regarding walking on compliant surfaces. My preliminary studies on myoelectric signals of the lower limbs during walking showed that there exists difference in muscle activation when walking on compliant surfaces. However, the mapping of muscle activities to joint torques for a prosthesis that will be capable of providing the required control to walk on compliant surfaces is not straightforward. In order to explore the effects of surface compliance on leg joint torque, a dynamic model of the lower limb was built using Simscape. The simulated walker (android) was commanded to track the same kinematics data of intact human walking on solid surface. Multiple simulations were done while varying ground stiffness in order to see how the torque at the leg joints would change as a function of the ground compliance. The results of this study could be used for the control of powered prostheses for robust walking on compliant surfaces.Dissertation/ThesisMasters Thesis Aerospace Engineering 201

외란 및 토크 대역폭 제한을 고려한 토크 기반의 작업 공간 제어

학위논문(박사) -- 서울대학교대학원 : 융합과학기술대학원 융합과학부(지능형융합시스템전공), 2021.8. 박재흥.The thesis aims to improve the control performance of the torque-based operational space controller under disturbance and torque bandwidth limitation. Torque-based robot controllers command the desired torque as an input signal to the actuator. Since the torque is at force-level, the torque-controlled robot is more compliant to external forces from the environment or people than the position-controlled robot. Therefore, it can be used effectively for the tasks involving contact such as legged locomotion or human-robot interaction. Operational space control strengthens this advantage for redundant robots due to the inherent compliance in the null space of given tasks. However, high-level torque-based controllers have not been widely used for transitional robots such as industrial manipulators due to the low performance of precise control. One of the reasons is the uncertainty or disturbance in the kinematic and dynamic properties of the robot model. It leads to the inaccurate computation of the desired torque, deteriorating the control stability and performance. To estimate and compensate the disturbance using only proprioceptive sensors, the disturbance observer has been developed using inverse dynamics. It requires the joint acceleration information, which is noisy due to the numerical error in the second-order derivative of the joint position. In this work, a contact-consistent disturbance observer for a floating-base robot is proposed. The method uses the fixed contact position of the supporting foot as the kinematic constraints to estimate the joint acceleration error. It is incorporated into the dynamics model to reduce its effect on the disturbance torque solution, by which the observer becomes less dependent on the low-pass filter design. Another reason for the low performance of precise control is torque bandwidth limitation. Torque bandwidth is determined by the relationship between the input torque commanded to the actuator and the torque actually transmitted into the link. It can be regulated by various factors such as inner torque feedback loop, actuator dynamics, and joint elasticity, which deteriorates the control stability and performance. Operational space control is especially prone to this problem, since the limited bandwidth of a single actuator can reduce the performance of all related tasks simultaneously. In this work, an intuitive way to penalize low performance actuators is proposed for the operational space controller. The basic concept is to add joint torques only to high performance actuators recursively, which has the physical meaning of the joint-weighted torque solution considering each actuator performance. By penalizing the low performance actuators, the torque transmission error is reduced and the task performance is significantly improved. In addition, the joint trajectory is not required, which allows compliance in redundancy. The results of the thesis were verified by experiments using the 12-DOF biped robot DYROS-RED and the 7-DOF robot manipulator Franka Emika Panda.본 학위 논문은 외란과 토크 대역폭 제한이 존재할 때 토크 기반 작업 공간 제어기의 제어 성능을 높이는 것을 목표로 한다. 토크 기반의 로봇 제어기는 목표 토크를 입력 신호로서 구동기에 전달한다. 토크는 힘 레벨이기 때문에, 토크 제어 로봇은 위치 제어 로봇에 비해 외부 환경이나 사람으로부터 가해지는 외력에 더 유연하게 대응할 수 있다. 그러므로 토크 제어는 보행이나 인간-로봇 상호작용과 같은 접촉을 포함하는 작업을 위해 효과적으로 사용될 수 있다. 작업 공간 제어는 이러한 토크 제어의 장점을 더 강화시킬 수 있는데, 로봇이 여유 자유도가 있을 때 작업의 영공간에서 존재하는 모션들이 내재적으로 유연하기 때문이다. 그러나 이러한 장점에도 불구하고 토크 기반의 로봇 제어기는 정밀 제어 성능이 떨어지기 때문에 산업용 로봇 팔과 같은 전통적인 로봇에는 널리 사용되지 못했다. 그 이유 중 한 가지는 로봇 모델의 기구학 및 동역학 물성치에 존재하는 외란이다. 모델 오차는 목표 토크를 계산할 때 오차를 유발하며, 이것이 제어 안정성과 성능을 약화시키게 된다. 외란을 내재 센서만을 이용하여 추정 및 보상하기 위해 역동역학 기반의 외란 관측기가 개발되어 왔다. 외란 관측기는 역동역학 계산을 위해 관절 각가속도 정보가 필요한데, 이 값이 관절 위치를 두 번 미분한 값이기 때문에 수치적인 오차로 노이즈해지는 문제가 있었다. 본 연구에서는 부유형 기저 로봇을 위한 접촉 조건이 고려된 외란 관측기가 제안되었다. 제안된 방법은 로봇의 고정된 접촉 지점에 대한 기구학적인 구속 조건을 이용하여 관절 각가속도 오차를 추정한다. 추정된 오차를 동역학 모델에 반영하여 외란 토크를 계산함으로써 저역 통과 필터 성능에 대한 의존도를 줄일 수 있다. 토크 기반 제어의 정밀 제어 성능이 떨어지는 또 다른 이유 중 하나는 토크 대역폭 제한이다. 토크 대역폭은 구동기에 전달되는 입력 토크와 실제 링크에 전달되는 토크와의 관계로 결정된다. 토크 대역폭은 구동기 내부의 토크 피드백 루프, 구동기 동역학, 관절 탄성 등의 요인들에 의해 제한될 수 있는데 이것이 제어 안정성 및 성능을 감소시킨다. 작업 공간 제어는 특히 이 문제에 취약한데, 대역폭이 제한된 구동기 하나가 그와 연관된 모든 작업 공간의 제어 성능을 감소시킬 수 있기 때문이다. 본 연구에서는 작업 공간 제어기에서 성능이 낮은 구동기의 사용을 제한하기 위한 직관적인 전략이 제안되었다. 기본 컨셉은 작업 제어를 위한 토크 솔루션에 성능이 좋은 관절에만 추가적으로 토크 솔루션을 더해나가는 것으로, 이것은 각 관절의 가중치가 고려된 토크 솔루션이 되는 것을 의미한다. 성능이 낮은 구동기의 사용을 제한함으로써 토크 전달 오차가 줄어들고 작업 성능이 크게 향상될 수 있다. 본 학위 논문의 연구 결과들은 12자유도 이족 보행 로봇 DYROS-RED와 7자유도 로봇 팔 Franka Emika Panda를 이용한 실험을 통해 검증되었다.1 INTRODUCTION 1 1.1 Motivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1.2 Contributions of Thesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 1.3 Overview of Thesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 2 BACKGROUNDS 6 2.1 Operational Space Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 2.2 Dynamics Formulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 2.2.1 Fixed-Base Dynamics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 2.2.1.1 Joint Space Formulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 2.2.1.2 Operational Space Formulation . . . . . . . . . . 11 2.2.2 Floating-Base Dynamics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 2.2.2.1 Joint Space Formulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 2.2.2.2 Operational Space Formulation . . . . . . . . . . 14 2.3 Position Tracking via PD Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 2.3.1 Torque Solution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 2.3.2 Orientation Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 3 CONTACT-CONSISTENT DISTURBANCE OBSERVER FOR FLOATING-BASE ROBOTS 22 3.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 3.2 Momentum-Based Disturbance Observer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 3.3 The Proposed Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 3.4 Experiments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 3.4.1 Setup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 3.4.2 External Force Estimation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 3.4.3 Internal Disturbance Rejection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 3.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 4 OPERATIONAL SPACE CONTROL UNDER ACTUATOR BANDWIDTH LIMITATION 40 4.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 4.2 The Proposed Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 4.2.1 General Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 4.2.2 OSF-Based Torque Solution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 4.2.3 Comparison With a Typical Method . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 4.3 Experiments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 4.3.1 Setup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 4.3.2 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 4.4 Comparison With Other Approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 4.4.1 Controller Formulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 4.4.1.1 The Proposed Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 4.4.1.2 The OSF Controller . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 4.4.1.3 The OSF-Filter Controller . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 4.4.1.4 The OSF-Joint Controller . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 4.4.1.5 The Joint Controller . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 4.4.2 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 4.5 Frequency Response of Joint Torque . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 4.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 5 CONCLUSION 85 Abstract (In Korean) 100박