Observer-corrector control design for robots with destabilizing unmodeled dynamics

Industrial robotic manipulators and other mechatronic systems often possess undesirable higher order dynamics exhibited in the form of resonance conditions which affect closed-loop stability when feedback control is applied. In this study, an alternative reduced-complexity control design strategy is presented. The fundamental idea of the proposed approach is to synthesize a substitute feedback signal which reflects the dominant dynamics essential for operation of the system subject to control but does not include the undesirable higher order dynamic effects. A unique arrangement of a band-limited state observer and a low-pass filter corrector is employed for this purpose, providing a mechanism to extract the dominant dynamics from the output of the system with minimal amplitude and phase distortion. The resulting synthetic signal is used as a controller input, effectively eliminating destabilizing effects of the undesirable higher order dynamics. As a result, the controller can be designed practically without taking the higher order dynamic effects into account, which allows for use of conventional control techniques, and translates into reduced modeling requirements, simplified controller design and shorter development time when compared to a complete dynamic analysis. The effectiveness of the proposed concept is demonstrated experimentally on motion control of a four-axis direct-drive robotic manipulator for automated pick-place operations in semiconductor manufacturing applications. It is concluded that the proposed control design strategy provides improved control performance, increased stability margin, and added robustness against variations in system parameters in comparison to common methods adopted currently in the engineering practice.