Identification of inertial and friction parameters for excavator arms

A novel yet simple approach for experimental determination of the link (mass and inertia-related) parameters and friction coefficients is developed for a typical excavator arm. The parameters are needed for indirect measurement of the external forces, compensation for the link weights in the operator's hand in a force-feedback teleoperation setup, impedance control of the arm, simulation of the manipulator dynamics, and model-based fault detection. Treating the machine arm as an open kinematic chain, its dynamic equations are presented symbolically. The static torque equations are derived from these equations and the gravitational parameters are defined accordingly. A new method for decoupled estimation of the gravitational parameters from static experiments is presented. Furthermore, the arm dynamics are expressed in a form which is linear in the inertia and friction-related parameters. The results obtained show that the identified model predicts the joint torques, in both static and dynamic conditions, with a very good accuracy.