Robust Tracking Control of a Direct Drive Robot

This paper presents a robust controller for tracking control of a direct-drive robot. The proposed controller consists of two portions: a computed torque method which precompensates for dynamics of the modeled plant and an H∞ controller which postcompensates for residual errors which are not completely removed by the computed torque method. Experimental methods for identifying appropriate model structure and parameters are presented, and three specific controller types are compared. Using the robot designed in our laboratory, the combined controller reduced tracking errors by one half compared to computed torque control alone, and by one sixth compared to conventional independent joint control.