CONTROL OF A SINGLE-LINK FLEXIBLE-JOINT ROBOT VIA BACKSTEPPING

Abstract

• It is usual to consider, in the derivation of robot dynamics, that the arm is a linkage of connected rigid bodies, neglecting, this way, cross-coupling and nonlinear effects that result from the dynamic interactions with the drive system. However, many industrial robots exhibit significant joint flexibility and cannot be considered a pure system of rigid bodies. Thus, control designs that do not consider this effect may lead to poor  performance, especially for precise motion systems, where high performance with high speed is required. This
  paper proposes a control design based on the backstepping technique, where the gains are obtained by solving an optimization problem, which is able to guarantee tracking of the reference trajectory for a single-link robot manipulator with flexible joints.