Improved Funnel Control for Waterwheel Handling Robot Manipulators With Unknown Dead Zone

In this paper, a waterwheel-handling robot based on funnel control was proposed for loading and unloading particles in docks and ports by optimizing the control method and modifying the controller. It can solve the problems of the high procurement cost of large-scale handling equipment and the low efficiency of small-scale handling equipment. Common handling equipment has low positioning accuracy, operating speed, and trajectory accuracy because of the existence of dead zone, friction, unmodeled dynamics, parameter uncertainty, external disturbances, environmental and human factors and other factors. In comparison with traditional proportional integral derivative control, even with initial errors and various disturbances, this robot adopted improved funnel control, which can still guarantee fast convergence of trajectory and speed, as well as keep tracking errors within the funnel-boundary range. Therefore, the operating accuracy and efficiency of the waterwheel-handling robot are significantly improved based on this research.