Evaluation of an External Vibration Damping Approach for Robot Manipulators Using a Flexible Multi Body Simulation

In order to achieve increasingly high path accuracy of robot manipulators the structural dynamics of the links, joints and gears become progressively more relevant. To accurately control the TCP of the robot using the joint motors modern control techniques usually rely on high fidelity models, which are notoriously hard to acquire for real manipulator systems. This paper evaluates an external vibration damping approach which simplifies the control problem by adding a force input and acceleration feedback directly to the robot's TCP. The resulting vibration controller reduces the dynamic path error of the system while working independently of the robot's joint controller.