Low-complexity linear parameter-varying modeling and control of a robotic manipulator

In this paper, a practical procedure for linear parameter-varying (LPV) modeling and identification of a robotic manipulator is presented, which leads to a successful experimental implementation of an LPV gain-scheduled controller. A nonlinear dynamic model of a two-degrees-of-freedom manipulator containing all important terms is obtained and unknown parameters which are required to construct an LPV model are identified. An important tool for obtaining a model of complexity low enough to be suitable for controller synthesis is the principle-component-analysis-based technique of parameter set mapping. Since the resulting quasi-LPV model has a large number of affine scheduling parameters and a large overbounding, parameter set mapping is used to reduce conservatism and complexity in controller design by finding tighter parameter regions with fewer scheduling parameters. A sufficient a posteriori condition is derived to assess the stability of the resulting closed-loop system. To evaluate the applicability and efficiency of the approximated model, a polytopic LPV gain-scheduled controller is synthesized and implemented experimentally on an industrial robot for a trajectory tracking task. The experimental results illustrate that the designed LPV controller outperforms an independent joint PD controller in terms of tracking performance and achieves a slightly better accuracy than a model-based inverse dynamics controller, while having a simpler structure. Moreover, it is shown that the LPV controller is more robust against dynamic parameter uncertainty.