Bounded Compensation with Friction Estimation for Accurate Motion Tracking and Compliant Behavior of Industrial Manipulators

This paper proposes a control structure for accurate tracking and compliant behavior of industrial manipulators without additional sensors. To achieve control objectives, friction, one of the biggest causes of performance degradation, should be compensated. For tracking performance, the estimated friction cancels most friction effects as a feed-forward, and the modified robust control structure eliminates the remaining friction uncertainty, which was originally equivalent to the disturbance observer. For compliant behavior, the compensation force fed to the real plant is bounded in contrast to the conventional disturbance observer structure. The compensation bound could be determined through the experiments. The proposed method is validated by experiments with a 6-DOF collaborative industrial manipulator.