Experimental Application of Robust and Converse Dynamic Control for Rotary Flexible Joint Manipulator System

Performance evaluation of trajectory tracking for a rotary flexible joint system is demonstrated in this paper. The robust and converse dynamic (RCD) technique is proposed and implemented for this evaluation. This control methodology is of the left inversion type, i.e., the control inputs are obtained by means of plant output error feedback. RCD control encompasses the baseline inverse (BI) control and sliding mode control-based discontinuous control element. The baseline inverse controller enforces the prescribed servo (virtual) constraints that represent the control objectives. The control objectives of the baseline inverse controller are enclosed in the form of servo (virtual) constraints which are inverted using Moore–Penrose Generalized Inverse (MPGI) to solve for the baseline control law. To boost the robust attributes against parametric uncertainties and disturbances, a discontinuous control function is augmented with baseline controller such that semiglobal practical stability is guaranteed in the sense of Lyapunov. To exhibit the effectiveness of RCD control in terms of tracking performance, computer simulations are conducted in Simulink/Matlab environment. Furthermore, the practical implementation is also investigated through a real-time experiment on Quanser’s rotary flexible joint manipulator system. The experimental results obtained by RCD are compared to the conventional sliding mode and fractional-order control techniques.