Design of PID controllers for 4-DOF planar and spatial manipulators

Robotic manipulators are the most important components in the present manufacturing industry for handling materials and manipulation. It is important to note that these manipulators are used in the complex planar and spatial work spaces to perform the task. Further, it is also very difficult to manipulate and dynamically control the manipulators when the degrees of freedom (DOF) of the manipulator are increased. In the present manuscript, the dynamic analysis and design of PID controller for two different manipulator configurations, namely planar and spatial manipulators have been attempted. Moreover, both the manipulators considered in this study are provided with 4-DOF and dynamic analysis has been carried out using Lagrange-Euler (L-E) formulation. The main difference between the planar and spatial manipulator is that the former works in the two dimensional space and later works in a three dimensional space. In addition to the dynamic analysis, PID controllers have also been designed for the said configurations to follow a path between the given boundary conditions. Further, the developed controllers are tested in simulations, and found working satisfactorily.