Feed-forward control strategy for an industrial robot with elastic links and joints

For a lightweight industrial robot the influence of elasticity of joints and links is studied. The manipulator is modeled as a multibody system with distributed parameters. Standard control strategies yield bad performance in following a given trajectory or approaching a target point. Therefore the desired joint angles calculated under the assumption of rigid joints and links are modified by taking into account "nominal deflections" By this feedforward control strategy that compensates for the elastic deformations the oscillations of the endpoint of the manipulator can be reduced significantly.