Indirect disturbance compensation control of a planar parallel (2-PRP and 1-PPR) robotic manipulator

• A comprehensive analysis of a planar parallel robot (2-PRP and 1-PPR) is presented.
• An indirect adaptive controller with disturbance compensation has been introduced.
• Effectiveness of the controller has been verified with numerical simulations.
• A comparative study of the proposed and existing controllers has been performed.
• A detailed study on the system trajectory tracking capabilities has been done.

This study addresses the dynamic modelling and indirect disturbance compensation control of planar parallel robotic motion platform with three degrees of freedom (3-DOF) in the presence of parameter uncertainties and external disturbances. The proposed planar parallel motion platform is a singularity free manipulator and has three manipulator legs located on the same plane linked with a moving platform. Of the three aforementioned manipulator legs, two legs have a prismatic–revolute–prismatic (PRP) joint configuration each with only one prismatic joint deliberated to be active, and the other leg consists of prismatic–revolute–prismatic (PPR) joint configuration with one active prismatic joint. The closed form kinematic solution (both forward and reverse kinematics) for the platform has been obtained in completion. In addition, the dynamic model for the platform has been communicated using the energy based Euler–Lagrangian formulation method. The proposed controller is based on a computer torque control with disturbance compensation integrated with it. Disturbance vectors comprising disturbances due to parameter variations, payload variations, frictional effects and other additional effects have been estimated using an extended Kalman filter (EKF). The EKF proposed for this specific platform uses only position and orientation measurements for estimation and noise mitigation. Simulations with a characteristic trajectory are presented and the results have been paralleled with traditional controllers such as the proportional integral derivative (PID) controller and computed torque controller (CTC). The results demonstrate satisfactory tracking performance for the proposed controller in the presence of parameter uncertainties and external disturbances.