A Survey on Output Feedback Control of Robot Manipulators with an Application to PHANToM 1.5A Haptic Device

Abstract

This paper is aimed at presenting a short survey of velocity-free control schemes for robot manipulators. A salient feature of this work is the implementation of this control schemes on a simulation model of the 3-DOF industrial PHANToM 1.5 A robot. For both the regulation and tracking problems, two classes of control algorithms without velocity measurements are considered, namely, those based on observer-controller combination and those based on approximate derivation through an n-order filter. The latter was shown to be more advantageous from different aspects. First the controllers based on approximate derivation are very intuitive and easy to implement in practice. Moreover, these algorithms are proved to be globally asymptotically stable, while the observer-based controllers have only local stability results. We have also considered some algorithms that are robust to load disturbances and to unmodeled dynamics. Simulation results have confirmed the theoretical advantages and drawbacks of each algorithm.