Force Control of Flexible Arm Using Two-Degree-of-Freedom Control System

Abstract

So far, a considerable amount of research has been devoted to flexible arms, especially to their modelling, position control and vibration control. Meanwhile very few research has addressed the problem of force control, since it is one of the most important functions of the robot tasks. In this paper, we present a two-degree-of-freedom control system for the force control of flexible cartesian robots. Use of a two-degree-of freedom control system guarantees the independent design of the feedforward and feedback control characteristics. The feedforward controller is designed using inverse dynamics, while the design of the stabilized feedback controller is achieved by Lyapunov's direct method. Numerical simulation and experimental results confirm that faster precise force control can be realized with the proposed control system.