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A simple robust compliant-motion-control technique is presented for a robot manipulator with nonlinear friction. The control technique incorporates both time-delay-estimation technique and ideal velocity feedback; the former is used to cancel out soft nonlinearities, and the latter serves to reduce the effect of hard nonlinearities, including Coulomb friction and stiction. The proposed controller has a simple structure and yet provides good online friction compensation without modeling friction. The robustness of the proposed method has been confirmed through comparisons with other controllers in 2-DOF SCARA-type industrial robot experiments. Index Terms--Compliant motion control, friction, hard nonlinearity, impedance control, time-delay control (TDC).

The Time Delay Control with Switching Action (TDCSA) method, which consists of Time Delay Control (TDC) and a switching action of sliding mode control (SMC), has been proposed as a promising technique in the robust control area where the plant has an unknown dynamics with parameter variations and substantial disturbances are preset. When TDCSA is applied to the plant with saturation nonlinearity, however, the so-called windup phenomenon is observed to arise, causing excessive overshoot and instability. The integral element of TDCSA and the saturation element of a plant cause the windup phenomenon. There are two integral effects in TDCSA. One is the integral effect caused by time delay estimation of TDC. The other is the integral term of an integral sliding surface. To solve this problem, we have proposed an anti-windup scheme method for TDCSA. The stability of the overall system has been proved for a class of nonlinear system. Experimental results show that the proposed method overcomes the windup problem of the TDCSA.

It is well known that conventional Input Shaping Technique (IST) is not very effective in suppressing residual vibrations for non-LTI systems, such as substantially nonlinear or time-varying systems. In an effort to increase the effectiveness such systems, this paper presents Learning Input Shaping Technique (LIST) which iteratively updates the parameters of IST from previous trials. Simulations are presented for four different cases: (1) when the natural frequency or damping of a system is not estimated well; (2) when a system has time varying vibration; (3) when a system has nonlinear flexibility; and (4) when a closed-loop system includes a saturation element in the loop. LIST is experimented on a six D.O.F industrial robot to evaluate its effectiveness. The results of the simulations and the experiment show that the residual vibrations become considerably smaller as iteration goes on, thereby demonstrating the effectiveness of LIST. [DOI: 10.1115/1.1367334]

A trajectory control strategy for a nonminimum phase system is proposed. A continuous-time version of the Zero Phase Error Tracking Controller (ZPETC), which is a well-known discrete-time feedforward controller, is considered. In the continuous-time case, the overall transfer function consisting of the ZPETC and the closed-loop plant exhibits high-pass filter characteristics. This introduces serious gain errors between the desired and actual output if the desired output is made directly as the ZPETC's input. This paper proposes the use of a specially designed sinusoidal trajectory to compensate for the gain errors. The sinusoidal trajectory imparts a synergic effect to tracking performance when combined with the continuous ZPETC. Continuous ZPETC with sinusoidal trajectory is evaluated successfully by applying to a nonminimum phase plant, single link flexible arm. [DOI: 10.1115/1.1343464]

An extension to operational space (EXOS) is presented for the explicit representation of the null-space (NS) dynamics and its interaction with the operational-space dynamics. First, the EXOS Jacobian is formed by augmenting the Jacobian matrix with a minimum number of its NS vectors. Based on the EXOS Jacobian, free of algorithmic singularity, the kinematics, statics, and dynamics of a redundant manipulator are derived in a compact form. In particular, the resulting EXOS dynamics is able to identify the inner dynamic structure. Its efficacy and efficiency have been demonstrated through comparative analysis and simulation. Index Terms--Dynamics, kinematics, null space, operational space, redundant manipulator, statics.