Experimental Evaluation of Feedforward Control Based on the Dynamic Models of A Direct Drive SCARA Robot

Abstract

A SCARA type direct drive robot which can be used in the assembly operation was designed and manufactured. Graphite fiber epoxy composite material was used in the fabrication of the robot arm structure in order to improve the speed of the robot arm with a high damping effect. For model-based control and sensitivity analysis of system parameters, the dynamic model of robot arm and drive servo amplifier parameters such as equivalent gains of PWM driver and velocity gains of servo system were estimated from frequency response tests. The complete dynamic model for overall robot system was used in the simulation of the open-loop control. The simulation results agreed reasonably well to the experimental results. The feedforward control using the dynamic models improved the trajectory tracking performance, decreasing the tracking error by factor of three compared with PID control. This study found that the inverse dynamic model of the robot arm including the drive servo system showed better performances than the case of arm dynamic model only.