Design of a Disturbance Observer for a Two-Link Manipulator With Flexible Joints

This brief proposes a method for designing a disturbance observer (DOB) to decouple joint interactions in robot dynamics with nonlinearity. The traditional DOB based on filter design theory has limited performance since the cut-off frequency of its Q-filter is the only tunable parameter to deal with disturbance suppression and model uncertainty. In this brief, a robust optimal design method is developed for the DOB, which can achieve optimal performance of suppressing disturbance by systematically shaping its Q-filter. Simulation results of application to a two-link manipulator with flexible joints show the improvements in disturbance suppression, which illustrates the validity of the proposed method.