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Decentralized Control of Harmonic Drive Based Modular Robot Manipulator using only Position Measurements: Theory and Experimental Verification

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Abstract

This paper presents a decentralized control approach of harmonic drive (HD) based modular robot manipulator (MRM) using only position measurements. Unlike known methods that rely on joint torque and velocity sensing, this paper addresses the problem of controlling HD based MRM using only position measurements on the motor and link sides of each module. The dynamic model of HD based MRM is formulated by employing a high-fidelity HD model and the velocity of each robot joint is estimated based on a novel nonlinear velocity estimator. With only local information on each module, a decentralized integral sliding mode controller (ISMC) is designed based on variable gain super-twisting algorithm (VGSTA) to compensate the model uncertainty and to reduce the chattering effect of the controller. The asymptotic stability of the closed-loop system is proved using the Lyapunov theory. Finally, experiments are performed for a 3-DOF MRM to verify the advantage of the proposed method.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant no. 61374051), the State Key Laboratory of Management and Control for Complex Systems (Grant no. 20150102) and the Scientific Technological Development Plan Project in Jilin Province of China (Grant nos. 20160414033GH, 201605-20013JH and 20150520112JH). The first author is also funded by China Scholarship Council. The authors would like to thank Guangjun Liu of the Ryerson University, Canada, for helping with the setup of the experiments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Control Science and Engineering, Changchun University of Technology, Changchun, 130012, China

    Bo Dong, Keping Liu & Yuanchun Li

  2. The State Key Laboratory of Management and Control for Complex Systems, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China

    Bo Dong

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  1. Bo Dong
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  2. Keping Liu
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  3. Yuanchun Li
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Correspondence to Yuanchun Li.

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Dong, B., Liu, K. & Li, Y. Decentralized Control of Harmonic Drive Based Modular Robot Manipulator using only Position Measurements: Theory and Experimental Verification. J Intell Robot Syst 88, 3–18 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-017-0521-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-017-0521-x

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