An experimental setup for dynamics control of robot manipulators

In this paper, a four degree of freedom commercial robot manipulator is transformed and simplified into a two degree of freedom planar manipulator in order to verify different types of control algorithms without the need to consider redundancy. Due to the property of high back-drivability of this manipulator, it has been designed without joint brakes or locks. To lock two joints, a mechanical technique together with a control algorithm is proposed, which guarantees the stillness of these joints. Reference trajectories are chosen to be smooth and differentiable to avoid numerical and mechanical problems in the experimental implementation. Experimental results are given to illustrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed experimental setup.