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Experimental verification of rapid tracking by a robot manipulator in short duration processes

University of British Columbia

This thesis presents results of a series of experiments carried out to evaluate the applicability and performance of the recently developed Rapid Tracking Control Methodology on a robot manipulator. The control experiments were done on the UBC Parallelogram Direct Drive Arm (PDDARM), with the objective to control the arm to track an almost arbitrarily specified short but complex trajectory precisely. This experimental research project consists of two phases. The first involves estimation of the dynamic model of the direct drive manipulator. A practical and effective procedure was developed from the PDDARM Dynamic Equations of Motion to generate a dynamic equation which is linear in terms of the manipulator inertial parameters. This was then used to identify a dynamic model of the direct drive manipulator suitable for the purposes of control. The identification results were quite good since the applied torques can be predicted quite accurately from the estimated parameters. The second phase of the research is to apply the estimated dynamic model of the PDDARM to evaluate the trajectory following control performance of the Rapid Tracking Control algorithm. Observations and analysis of the experimental results show that the Rapid Tracking Control algorithm can significantly improve the trajectory following capability of a robot manipulator, as well it has all of the nice properties predicted by the previous theoretical analysis. It was further found that the application of this algorithm actually reduces the amount of time during which the system actuators may saturate when tracking a complex trajectory. Due to the fact that the algorithm is equivalent to a very high order feedback/feedforward controller, its output excites the controlled system quite persistently during operation. As a result, its application also facilitates identification of the system model for adaptive control.

Thesis/Dissertation

application/pdf

2009-02-24

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/4968

Electrical and Computer Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCV

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