Dynamic control of a robot manipulator for high‐performance conveyor tracking

Abstract

Abstract A new robot control scheme for the specific application to conveyor tracking is presented. To improve the performance of conveyor tracking, the robot arm dynamics is incorporated into the control scheme. The tracking problem for the workpiece on a variable‐speed conveyor is formulated as a stochastic optimal tracking problem with specified criteria. Dividing the conveyor speed into the nominal term and the perturbed term, a two‐stage control strategy is employed to cope with the nonlinearity and uncertainty of the robot‐conveyor system. Simulation results are given to verify the good tracking performance with fast cycle time and high accuracy obtained in a robotic workcell. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc .