Identification of articulated body inertias and decoupled control of robots in terms of quasi-coordinates

Addresses two problems. One is to find the configuration-independent critical parameter for the articulated body inertia. The author analyzes the articulated body inertia matrix which appears in the discrete Riccati equation. It depends on kinematical parameters of the robot and on the inertial parameters of each link. Due to the dependence of the articulated body inertia on the kinematic parameters a standard discrete Fourier transform (DFT) is proposed to identify these parameters. Several examples show that this technique can be successfully applied to articulated inertia parameters. The remaining part of the paper is devoted to adaptive control algorithms for robots whose dynamics are described by making use of quasi-coordinates. Two set point control algorithms are presented and illustrated by simulation results.