Robust Control of Flexible Robot Manipulators

Abstract

A robust control is designed for flexible joint robot manipulators which can be decomposed into two cascaded subsystems; a series connection of robot link dynamics and joint dynamics. A recursive design method is used for the controller design. The recursive design procedure is constructive and contains two steps. First, a fictitious robust controller for the robot link dynamics is designed as if the link dynamics had an independent control. As the fictitious control, a nonlinear H <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">infin</sub> control using the energy dissipation is designed in the sense of L <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sub> -gain attenuation from the disturbance caused by uncertainties to performance. Second, a real robust control is designed recursively by using a Lyapunov's second method. The designed robust control is applied to a 2 DOF robot manipulator with joint flexibilities