Robust Control of Flexible Joint Robot Manipulator

A feedback linearization based control is employed for the rigid link model of a robot having joint flexibility and the effect of joint flexibility is treated as a disturbance. A novel Uncertainty and Disturbance Estimator (UDE) is then used to estimate the disturbance to robustify the feedback linearizing controller. As only motor side variables are used in controller, the number of sensors are reduced. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the design, numerical simulations are carried out by considering parametric uncertainties and joint flexibility and the results are presented.