Robust independent robot joint control: design and experimentation

An approach is presented for the design of simple robust independent joint controllers which result in linear decoupled joint motions. In this approach each joint is treated as a simple inertial systems plus a disturbance torque representing all the unmodeled dynamics. By means of a very simple procedure, the disturbance is instantly estimated and rejected, thus allowing simple PD control to be used. The controllers are inherently robust. Experimental evaluations of the controller on a PUMA 560 are are performed, and the experimental results are presented.>