Decoupling control for spatial six-degree-of-freedom electro-hydraulic parallel robot

This paper presents a decoupling controller equipped with cross-coupling pre-compensation for an electro-hydraulic parallel robot, in order to weaken system dynamic coupling effects usually ignored on the design of advanced controllers and improve system control performance. The mathematical model of the electro-hydraulic parallel robot is built using the Kane method and a hydromechanics approach, and the kinematical model is established with a closed-form solution and the Newton–Raphson method. The feedback linearization theory is applied to reduce coupling effects stemmed from system dynamics of the parallel robot via incorporating force–velocity control with cross-coupling pre-compensations. The control performance involving stability, accuracy, and robustness of the proposed controller for spatial 6-DOF parallel robot is analyzed in theory and experiment. The experimental results illustrate that the proposed controller can highly improve the control performance by weakening system dynamic coupling effects of the electro-hydraulic parallel robot, especially for trajectory tracking performance.

► We develop a novel decoupling controller (DC) for spatial 6-DOF electro-hydraulic parallel robot.
► Computed force–velocity feed forward is involved for approximate decoupling.
► Potential of spatial electro-hydraulic parallel robot is further exploited with DC.
► Strong dynamic coupling effects of parallel robot in control are weakened by DC.
► Dynamic tracking performance is greatly improved through DC.