Control of Very Lightweight 2-DOF Single-Link Flexible Robots Robust to Strain Gauge Sensor Disturbances: A Fractional-Order Approach.

This article deals with the control of two degrees of freedom manipulators that have a flexible and very lightweight link. These robots have a single low-frequency and high-amplitude vibration mode. Their actuators have high friction, and their vibration sensors are often strain gauges that have offset and high-frequency noise. These problems reduce the robot precision and produce noisy control signals that saturate actuators. An efficient control system is proposed to overcome these drawbacks. Actuator friction effect is nearly removed by closing a high gain position control loop around the actuator. It causes the separation of the robot dynamics into the controlled actuator fast subsystem and the link dynamics slow subsystem. Based on that, an innovative control system is designed to remove vibrations using the singular perturbation theory combined with the input-state linearization technique. This control system includes fractional-order controllers that nearly remove unknown sensor offset and sensor ramp disturbances while reducing the high-frequency component of the control signal caused by sensor noise. Simulated and experimental results show the superior performance of these controllers over other standard integer-order controllers of similar complexity and nominal behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]