A study of manipulator dynamics and control

Abstract

In this work, the dynamics and control of a manipulator arm are investigated. Two different forms of the dynamic model of an n degree of freedom manipulator are studied and general computer oriented algorithms are developed to obtain the system matrices of the dynamic model. The algorithms are based on Newtonian mechanics; they/are recursive and independent of the manipulator configuration. For the purpose of control of a manipulator arm two different control schemes are proposed which are based on minimum energy optimal control. In the first method the system is decomposed into n subsystems and each subsystem is controlled independently while, in the second method the dynamic coupling among subsystems is taken into account. Computer simulations-are carried out for two different manipulator models in order to investigate the effectiveness of the proposed control methods, and it is seen that the proposed suboptimal adaptive feedback law gives reasonably good results.