EXPERIMENTS WITH POSITION AND INTERACTION CONTROL FOR A ROBOT WITH ONE FLEXIBLE LINK

One of the major drawbacks of flexible-link robot applications is its low tip precision, which is an essential characteristic for applications with position and interaction control with a contact surface. In this paper, position and interaction control strategies considering a rigid contact surface are applied to a flexible-link manipulator. The applied strategies are based on the closed-loop inverse kinematics algorithm (CLIK) to obtain the desired angular references to the joint position controller. The control schemes were previously tested by simulation and further implemented on a two degrees of mobility flexible-link planar robot. The obtained experimental results exhibit a good position and force tracking performance. The overall results reveal the successful implementation of the control architectures for a robot with one flexible link.