Drive-Based Vibration Damping Control for Robot Machining

The objective of this letter is to propose a drive-based control method for damping joint vibrations in order to improve the machining quality and the productivity of robot machining. The machining quality is significantly determined by the transfer behavior of the gearboxes installed in the robot joints. This letter presents a novel approach for drive-based damping of these vibrations and thus for increasing the dynamic path accuracy on the basis of secondary encoders. The approach represents an enhancement of the independent joint control, which is widely used in industry. The simulation as well as the experimental results on a KUKA KR210-2 demonstrate the effectiveness of the presented control method for damping gearbox vibrations and increasing the dynamic path accuracy of industrial robot manipulators.