Experimental Study on Neural Network-ARX and ARMAX Actuation Identification of a 3-DoF Delta Parallel Robot for Accurate Motion Controller Design

This paper investigates the problem of actuator identification of a 3-DoF Delta parallel robot, by means of linear AutoRegressive Moving Average with eXogenous input (ARMAX) and nonlinear dynamic Neural Network AutoRegressive with eXogenous input (NN-ARX) methods. To this end, the ARMAX and NN-ARX approaches are used to develop a scheme which is capable of identifying a model for each actuator. Based on the ARMAX structure, an accurate model of the actuation system is derived. The model is then trained and tested using the data collected from a real robotic setup. Using a dynamic neural network capabilities, an identification and prediction scheme is designed for modeling the nonlinear dynamic behavior of the system. The NN-ARX is trained based on the collected data from the system, and the new trajectory data is used to validate both methods. By considering the results of experimental implementations, three servo motors are demonstrated to have different dynamical behavior which was expected to happen from the outset, due to uncertainty in fabrication of motors component and gearbox. In the identification and prediction stages, the Root Mean Square Errors (RMSE) index is used to validate and analyze the performance of each method using the validation data from new trajectories. In terms of predicting the output of the system, NN-ARX performed better than ARMAX with RMSE of 0.001441, compared to ARMAX with RMSE of 0.0886. Due to the high accuracy of the obtained models. thus they can be used in the design of motion controllers and modelling disturbances in the system.