Friction Compensation in Robotics: an Overview

Friction effects are particularly critical for industrial robots, since they can induce large positioning errors, stick-slip motions, and limit cycles. This paper offers a reasoned overview of the main friction compensation techniques that have been developed in the last years, regrouping them according to the adopted kind of control strategy. Some experimental results are reported, to show how the control performances can be affected not only by the chosen method, but also by the characteristics of the available robotic architecture and of the executed task.