IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 18, NO.
1, JANUARY 2010 143
Dynamic Compensation Control of Flexible MacroMicro Manipulator Systems Tang Wen Yang, Member, IEEE, Wei Liang Xu, Senior Member, IEEE, and Jian Da Han, Member, IEEE AbstractMacromicro architecture, which consists of macro and micro manipulators, is used here to eliminate errors at the tip of a exible manipulator. The macro uses long arms and has such advantages as larger work volume and lower energy consumption but suffers from large deformations and vibrations. The micro is a smaller rigid manipulator and is attached on the end of the macro to isolate the system endpoint from the undesirable exibility of the macro. Using perturbation theories, a new kinematical method is introduced, rst, by redening the micros motion as a means of compensating for the errors at the endpoint of the macro. Then, an excellent practical control scheme is proposed to realize the end- point control with the feedback of joint angles and vibrations. A PD controller is applied to the micro, which augmented the com- pensation quantities. To damp out vibrations, a nonlinear control law is proposed for the macro, taking the interacting dynamics of the micro to the macro into account. The compensation and control algorithms work very well on a macromicro setup, and numerous experimental results prove the applicability of the pro- posed schemes. Index TermsEndpoint control, error compensation, exible manipulators, macromicro systems. I. INTRODUCTION L ARGELIGHTrobotic systems nowfeature in many space missions [1]. Not only are they playing a more impor- tant role in space-station construction and extravehicular-ac- tivity support but they can also be used to transfer payloads, re- place orbital units, and maintain the elements of space station. Besides, large robotic systems nd applications in the elds of aircraft cleaning [2] and nuclear waste clear up [3], where long-reach operation is required. Usually, a large robotic system has long and slender arms. For example, the developing Cana- dian Mobile Servicing System in the International Space Sta- tion is approximately 17 m long when all the arms are fully ex- tended. Such a robotic system is far from being stiff and is often described as a exible arm. Compared with heavy and bulky industrial robots, exible arms have such obvious advantages as larger work volume and lower energy consumption, but they Manuscript received February 27, 2008. Manuscript received in nal form October 31, 2008. First published April 14, 2009; current version published December 23, 2009. Recommended by Associate Editor R. Moheimani. This work was supported in part by the National Science Fund of China under Grant 60305008, by the State Key Laboratory of Robotics, CAS under Grant RL200702, and by the Beijing Jiaotong University under Grant 2007XM007. T. W. Yang is with the School of Computer and Information Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China (e-mail: twyang@bjtu.edu. cn). W. L. Xu is with the School of Engineering and Advanced Tech- nology, Massey University, Auckland 102 904, New Zealand (e-mail: w.l.xu@massey.ac.nz). J. D. Han is with the Shenyang Institute of Automation, Shenyang 110016, China (e-mail: jdhan@sia.cn). Color versions of one or more of the gures in this brief are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identier 10.1109/TCST.2008.2009529 suffer large deformations and low-frequency vibrations, typi- cally caused by structural exibility. Consequently, issues such as motion planning and dynamic modeling become very com- plicated, and end-effector position and force control are even more challenging. Over the past decades, these issues have received intensive at- tention, with no generic solution to date. Widely used modeling methods include the assumed-mode method and the nite-el- ement method with either Lagrangian or NewtonEuler recur- sive formulations. On the control side, a variety of strategies, like singular perturbation methods [4] and Lyapunov-based con- trollers [5], have been investigated. Vibration is one of the crit- ical problems to control a exible manipulator, and many ap- proaches to suppress vibrations have been reported, such as input shaping techniques [6]. Recently, wave-based strategies [7] are proposed to absorb the vibration energy inside a exible system. Macromicro architecture has also been introduced as a way to improve the motion performance of exible manipula- tors while suppressing the vibrations. It consists of a large macro and small micro manipulators and, thus, combines the merits of large and small manipulators. A large macro manipulator has large workspace but more or less limits the dexterity and speed at its endpoint, while a small micro one is attached on the end of the macro, providing fast precise motion at the tip point. Macromicro manipulator systems are structurally stable and well suitable for fast and precise endpoint positioning. More- over, the lower inertia design of a micro manipulator is helpful for precise force control [8]. Generally, a exible macromicro manipulator system is redundant and dynamically nonlinear, and the structural exibility and the dynamic coupling between the macro and the micro make the control issue much compli- cated. Control-law design for the system is not an easy job and very challenging. The idea of mounting a smaller manipulator on the end of a exible manipulator was introduced initially in [9]. A quick wrist, namely, micro part, is attached to a exible manipulator, forming a exible macromicro manipulator system. Research on the micro control mainly focuses on reducing the effects of the macro exibility. In [3], a motion compensator is added to the industrial controller of a exible macromicro system, using strain-gauge signals. In [10], a command lter is added again to the previous controller as an input prelter. George and Book [11] made use of the interacting dynamics between the micro and the macro to damp the macro vibration. In [12], the control gain matrices of the micro are carefully designed with a fre- quency-matching method, with no elastic-state measurements needed. As a macromicro system is redundant, motion plan- ning of such a system is a tough job, and the endpoint control becomes tremendously difcult. Zhang et al.[13] used the EDA algorithm with Gaussian probability model to generate optimal joint motions of a macromicro system. Yoshikawa et al.[14] in- troduced compensability and compensability-measure concepts 1063-6536/$26.00 2009 IEEE 144 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 18, NO. 1, JANUARY 2010 in motion planning, and a quasi-static trajectory control law is proposed to track the endpoint of a exible macromicro ma- nipulator system. In [15], a dynamic trajectory tracking con- trol is discussed, taking the system dynamics into account. With endpoint-position sensing, Ballhaus and Rock [16] proposed an endpoint control scheme. In [17], nonlinear inversion and pre- dictive control laws are designed for the micro and the macro, re- spectively. Recently, neural networks [18] and fuzzy logic [19] were also applied to the control of macromicro manipulator systems. The problem of force control was addressed in [20], as the micro contacts the environment. In this brief, endpoint control of a exible macromicro ma- nipulator system is discussed on the base of an error-compensa- tion method and a feedback control law. The errors at the end- point are compensated for through the fast and precise motions of the micro. Using perturbation theories, the error-compensa- tion method is introduced rst in the next section. Then, a new and practical control scheme is proposed with the feedback of the joint motions and vibrations in Section III. Section IV gives the experimental results on a planar exible macromicro ma- nipulator system to attest the proposed methods. Finally, con- clusions are drawn out in Section V. II. ERROR COMPENSATION OF A FLEXIBLE MACROMICRO MANIPULATOR SYSTEM The macro manipulator deploys the micro to the vicinity of a work site, where the dexterity of the micro can be then used to perform specic operations. Simultaneously, the errors at the tip of the macro are eliminated through the precise motion of the micro. In many researches published, the micro joint mo- tion is resolved into coarse and ne components. The coarse component is planned a priori by assuming a rigid kinematics. The ne motion commits to compensating for the errors at the system endpoint and is computed by complicated Jacobians, as done in [14] and [21]. In [23], the errors at the tip of a ex- ible manipulator are reduced signicantly through the actuator extra motion, obtained by perturbation theories. The work is ex- tended here to exible macromicro manipulator systems. Al- ternatively, we attempt to eliminate the errors at the endpoint of a exible macromicro manipulator by the micro, not the macro extra motions. Besides, the micro motions are not resolved into two parts. A. Tip Errors of a Flexible Macro Manipulator A exible macromicro manipulator system is shown in Fig. 1. The macro is a large manipulator with degrees of freedom, and the micro is a smaller one with degrees of freedom. The coordinate system is established rst. Each of the coordinate frame is located at either end of a link. The solid lines illustrate the exible macromicro system with the macro links bending. If no bending takes place, the system then becomes a rigid macromicro system, as shown in the gure with the dashed lines. is the base frame. represents the frame of the th link of the rigid system and is displaced to , due to the elastic deformations of the link. As the macro deformations are accumulated from the rst to the th link, the tip frame of the macro Fig. 1. Flexible macromicro manipulator system. moves to . is the endpoint frame of the macromicro manipulator system. As aforementioned, the displacements of each frame lead to a shift at the tip frame and are increasingly ac- cumulated at the endpoint of the macromicro system even- tually, which deteriorate an operation accuracy. The displace- ments come from many aspects, such as link and joint exibili- ties, mechanical inaccuracies, etc. Compared with the length of a exible link, the displacements are very tiny, allowing us to take them as perturbations in [22] and [23]. Therefore, pertur- bation theories are used here to derive the total errors at the tip of the macro rst. Usually, the deformations of the exible links contribute most of the displacements. Then, the displacements due to the link de- formations are our concern in this brief. But without loss of gen- erality, now, let us set the displacements of the frame of the th link to be (1) where is the translation displacements and is the angular displacements, in the frame . To calculate the total errors at the tip frame of the macro, the displacements of every frame are transformed into , assuming no displacements from the other frames. From perturbation theories [22], the displacements at the tip of the macro are (2) where is the Jacobian matrix of the displacement vector of to . YANG et al.: DYNAMIC COMPENSATION CONTROL OF FLEXIBLE MACROMICRO MANIPULATOR SYSTEMS 145 Now, the total errors can be obtained by summing up all the displacements as (3) where is the total translation error vector and is the total rotation errors of , with respect to . B. Compensating Motion of the Micro Manipulator is expressed in and, undoubtedly, leads to a shift at , if the micro are not adjusted. In order to keep the position and orientation of unchanged, the shift should be eliminated by adjusting some joint motions. A kinematical approach is presented here by redening the micro motions for the purpose. Dene and as the transformation matrices of and to , respec- tively, the transformation of the two can be then established with (4) (5) where are the joint angles of the macro and is the transformation matrix of any two adjacent coordinate frames. Instead, the position and orientation errors at the tip of the macro can be seen as the cause of a transformation of to the current axes of . Then, we have (6) Substituting (4) into (6), we obtain (7) where is a transformation caused by the total translation and rotation error vector , i.e., (8) Set to be the transformation of to , and if no compensation with the micro, we have (9) where are the desired joint motions of the micro and planned a priori. As can be seen, macromicro architecture has a big advantage over traditional robots to eliminate the shift without adjusting all the joints of a system. Different from [21] and [22], in this brief, we use the derived to redene the joint motions of the micro so as to eliminate errors at the endpoint. Going back to Fig. 1, we can see that can be interpreted alternatively Fig. 2. Plannar exible macromicro system. as the combination of a series of homogenous transformations of , and rewritten as (10) where are the redened joint motions of the micro. Then, from (9) and (10), we obtain (11) The link deformations of the macro can be measured in real time with a sensing system, which will be described in Section IV, and the micro desired motion is planned a priori. Then, in (11), its left term is known. Now, the problem becomes nding the micro joint variables , and essentially, it is a problem of inverse kinematics (more details to the inverse kinematics problem are out of the scope of this brief and can be found in [24]). For some cases, it is not necessary to plan the micro joint angles. That is to say, the micro is regulated to a conguration with all the joints xed initially, and then is exclusively used to compensate for the endpoint errors. C. Simulation Case As an example of demonstration, a exible macromicro ma- nipulator system shown in Fig. 2 is used to verify the com- pensation approach. The physical parameters of the simulation system are taken from an experimental system, which will be introduced in Section IV. Both the macro and the micro have 2 DOF, and all the joints are revolute and perpendicular to the motion plane. Therefore, the displacements at the tip frame of the macro are the position errors in the - and -axes and the orientation error of . To entirely compensate for the errors at the tip of the macro, the micro should have the same number or more degrees of freedom than a task space. As the micro dis- cussed here has 2 DOF, only the position errors of the macro are to be compensated for, and the orientation error is ignored here. However, the approach can be easily applied to any ex- ible spatial macromicro system. In the simulation, all the joints are planned a priori to follow sine trajectories, and the rst two dominant modes of the two exible links are presumed to be excited and to be calculated 146 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 18, NO. 1, JANUARY 2010 Fig. 3 Position errors at the endpoint of the macro. from the link deformations of the macro deliberately. In prac- tice, the link deformations are measured in real time with the sensing system introduced in Section IV. Fig. 3 shows the end- point-position errors in the base frame. They are computed from the link deformations and the joint angles of the macro. Fig. 4 shows the micro motions. The dashed lines are the desired an- gles while the solid lines the redened motions which dedicate to eliminate all the position errors at the end of the system. III. CONTROLLER DESIGN OF A MACROMICRO MANIPULATOR SYSTEM A macromicro manipulator system has a large arm carrying on a smaller manipulator. The macro provides the systema large workspace, whereas the micro has a limited workspace but can move faster and is more dexterous. Its endpoint reects the be- havior of the exible macromicro system. In other words, the micro isolates the endpoint from the undesirable exibility of the macro. But inevitably, there exists dynamic interaction be- tween the macro and the micro. In the following, we discuss the endpoint-control problemby taking the interaction into account. The equations of motion of a exible macromicro manipu- lator system can be derived by using Lagrangian formulations and have the form of (12) Fig. 4. Desired and redened joint angles of the micro. where and are the joint variables of the macro and the micro. are the deformations of the macro exible links. is the system inertia, and . is the nonlinear centrifugal, elastic, and Coriolis force. is the system stiffness matrix. and are the drive torques/forces of the macro and the micro, respectively. The micro commits to implement error compensation with fast response. Although the perturbation at the macro end acts on the micro, simple and effective control laws are preferred for the rigid micro in many applications. Herein, an industrial PD control law is adopted, combining the compensation quantities, and given by (13) where and are the positive proportional and deriva- tive gain matrices. is the measured joint variables of the micro, and is the redened joint angles of the micro, namely, . The macro uses long, lightweight, and therefore elastic links to be capable of performing long-reach operations but suffers from the undesirable deformations of the elastic links as the system runs at high speed. If the endpoint is directly chosen as YANG et al.: DYNAMIC COMPENSATION CONTROL OF FLEXIBLE MACROMICRO MANIPULATOR SYSTEMS 147 the output and the driving torques are chosen as the inputs, the macro is nonminimumphase. This is recognized as the difculty of endpoint control of exible arms, and the elastic modes must be constrained so as not to spoil the stability of the whole con- trol system. The equations of motion of the exible macromicro manip- ulator systemare written in a formthat is a function of joint vari- ables and link deformations, but here, we control the endpoint motion of the system. Therefore, the system dynamics model needs to be transformed into the operational space, namely, the task space, for the purpose of control design. As is non- singular matrix, (12) can be then rewritten as (14) where and are the and identity matrices, respectively. Set to be the system output vector in the task space, then it can be calculated from the joint variables and the link deformations, i.e., (15) Differentiating (15) twice, we have (16) where is the Jacobian of , with respect to the joint velocities of the macro and the micro and the link-deformation rates to the endpoint velocities. Substituting (16) into (14), we obtain (17) where Fig. 5. Block diagram of the endpoint control scheme. Then, in the task space, a feedback linearization control law is proposed below for the exible macro, given by (18) where is the inner loop of the control to be determined. is the generalized inverse of . If the number of degrees of freedom of the macro is equal to that of the task space , becomes . Here, the inner loop of the control law has the form of (19) where is the endpoint trajectory of the exible macromicro system, planned with a rigid system. and are the positive feedback gain matrices. Now, (13), (18), and (19) establish the framework of an end- point control scheme, and Fig. 5 shows the block diagram of the complete control system. As the control input vector is spec- ied in the task space, a planner is used to obtain the joint vari- ables of the micro while its control is realized in the joint space. In Section II, (2), (3), (7), and (11) give the expression of the compensation algorithm. is the desired joint motions of the micro, namely, in (9). Note that if is given with the micro joints xed, then should be replaced by the feedback of the micros joint position to compute the redened variables with (11). For this case, the micro is ex- clusively dedicated to compensate for the errors at the endpoint of the macro. The stability of the control system is analyzed in the task space by introducing the system-error dynamics. Let us dene as the tracking errors, it is then bounded. Substituting (18) and (19) into (17) yields (20) Then, the system-error dynamics can be rewritten as a linear form of (21) where 148 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 18, NO. 1, JANUARY 2010 Fig. 6. Experimental macromicro system. To prove the control system stability, we dene a matrix to be the solution of the following equations: (22) where is a specied positive-denite matrix. The solution of (22) is symmetric positive denite. Now, a Lyapunov function candidate can be dened to be (23) Obviously, . Differentiating it and substituting (21) and (22) into the resulting equation, we have (24) It can be seen that . According to the invariant-set theorem [25], the control system is asymptotically stable, and the system errors tend toward zero. The parameter uncertainties in (18) was not studied in the stability analysis of the control scheme, but the experimental results as follows prove the control stability appropriately. IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS A planar exible macromicro system, shown in Fig. 6, was constructed to do researches on exible manipulators. The macro is a 2-DOF exible-link manipulator. The micro is a ve-bar kinematic chain, with the same number of degrees of freedom as the macro. The cranks of the micro are same in length, so are the connecting links. All the joints are revolute, with the axes perpendicular to the horizontal motion plane. The physical parameters of the exible macro and the rigid micro are given, respectively, in Tables I and II. The reach of the micro is 0.10 m, in comparison with a total reach of 0.90 m of the macro. The two links of the macro use lightweight aluminum alloy with rectangular cross section. The deformations and vibrations are therefore conned to the motion plane. The joints of the macro are driven by two servo ac motors with a 25:1 gear re- duction on the shoulder and 5:1 on the elbow. The micro is ac- tuated by two identical direct-drive dc motors. Each the joint of the macromicro system is equipped with an encoder on the TABLE I PHYSICAL PARAMETERS OF THE FLEXIBLE MACRO TABLE II KEY PARAMETERS OF THE FIVE-BAR MICRO Fig. 7. Laser diode and PSD. Fig. 8. Endpoint motion in the Cartesian space. motor shaft to measure that the angle, and the velocity, is calcu- lated here from the angle variable using backward difference. An industrial control computer is used to handle all the real- time processing. Data communications are done with the con- trol laboratory cards on the bus. A three-channel quadrature card is used to count the pulses from the encoders to obtain joint position. All the control commands are sent to the motors through card and drive amplier. The analog signals of the torque sensors and the position-sensitive detectors (PSDs) are converted into digital data through . PSD is an optical-sen- sitive device with fast response and high resolution and applied to measure deformations and vibrations at the end of each the YANG et al.: DYNAMIC COMPENSATION CONTROL OF FLEXIBLE MACROMICRO MANIPULATOR SYSTEMS 149 Fig. 9. Responses of the macro joints. Fig. 10. Position errors at the endpoint with no compensation. macro exible link and working with laser diode. The PSD is mounted on one end of a exible link, and the laser diode on the other end of the link, as shown in Fig. 7. Note that we only con- cern the deformations and vibrations on the motion plane. In the previous study [22], an optical-sensing system was presented to Fig. 11. Responses of the micro joints. measure spatial deformations, and the principle of measurement was also introduced. All the real-time software codes are developed in C++. Here, we attempt to control the endpoint of the macro to move from an initial point ( m, ) to a target point of ( m, m) in the base frame, following a parabolic trajectory, given by (25) The trajectory is well covered by the reach of the macro, and the micro exclusively commits to compensate for the errors at the endpoint of the system. The initial positions of the micros two joints are 30 and , respectively. As introduced ear- lier, the micro joint variables are fed back to redene the next micro motion. All the controller gains were chosen empirically to ensure the control stability, and they can be determined with the estimation approach introduced in [26]. The control gains for the micro are , , , and , and the gain matrices for the macro controller are given respectively by 150 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 18, NO. 1, JANUARY 2010 Fig. 12. Position errors at the endpoint with the micros compensation. In Section III, a general control strategy is introduced for a exible macromicro system. However, as shown in Fig. 6, the micro mass is mainly placed on the end of the macro and its size is much smaller than that of the macro. Here, the micro is pre- sumed to be a lumped mass to derive the equations of motion of the macromicro system, and the dynamic interaction between the macro and the micro is thus equivalent to the lumped mass. Actually, (18) is the nonlinear feedback control law for the ex- ible macro. The experimental results are shown in Figs. 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12. Fig. 8 shows the endpoint positions of the system. Fig. 9 gives the joint responses of the macro. As shown, the response of the second joint, namely, the elbow joint, is trembling at the beginning of motion due to gravity, since no balance masses were used to counteract the suspension system. Fig. 10 shows the errors of the rst experiment at the endpoint of the micro in the Cartesian space, with no compensating motions added, and they are obtained from the feedback of the macro link deforma- tions and its joint variables. For comparison, the micro is used in the second experiment to compensate for the position errors at the tip by redening its joint motion, as shown in Fig. 11. The tip position errors are shown in Fig. 12. It can be seen that the largest errors are less than 0.25 cm in the -direction and 1.0 cm in the -direction. Although the endpoint errors cannot be entirely eliminated, they are far less than the results of the rst experiment. Moreover, the errors caused by the residual vibra- tions of the macro are nearly eliminated by the micro motion after a tracking maneuver is nished. V. CONCLUSION In this brief, the macromicro architecture, consisting of a large macro and a smaller micro manipulator, is presented to im- prove the endpoint motion of exible manipulators. The errors, caused by link deformations, mechanical or sensing inaccura- cies, etc., are transformed to the errors at the end of the macro, and the micro motions are redened to compensate for the er- rors with perturbation approaches. APDcontroller is chosen for the micro to meet the demand of fast response, augmented with the compensating terms. As the inertia of the micro is able to damp the macro vibrations, a feedback nonlinear control is pro- posed for the macro, which takes the dynamic interaction of the micro to the macro into account. The approaches proposed are applied to a exible macromicro manipulator system, and the experimental results show that the errors at the system endpoint are reduced considerably, and the control strategy is stable and applicable. 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