Model based control of industrial robot and implementation of its gain scheduling robust control

Over the decades, industrial robot is evolving along the trend of being more and more slim in stature and more and more compliant in character thanks to cost-driven design preference for lightweight arm and introduction of new drive chain with compact size and inherent compliance. Compared to traditional control effort on stiff chubby manipulators, accurate control of such flexible ones necessitates more intensive understanding into the dynamics of the system. In this paper, different modeling methods of industrial robots are reviewed, and then corresponding model based control methods are addressed. Especially, a novel gain scheduling robust control method is studied to tackle main issues regarding control of flexible robot, including flexibility compensation and handling of parametric uncertainty, unmodeled dynamics and disturbances. Both simulation and initial experimental results show us a promising perspective for its application in industrial robot control.