Experimental and Numerical Study on the Semi-Closed Loop Control of a Planar Parallel Robot Manipulator

This paper implements the model predictive control to fulfill the position control of a 3-DOF 3- RRR planar parallel manipulator. The research work covers experimental and numerical studies. First, an experimental hardware-in-the-loop system to control the manipulator is constructed. The manipulator is driven by three DC motors, and each motor has an encoder to measure the rotating angles of the motors. The entire system is designed as a semiclosed-loop control system. The controller receives the encoder signals as inputs to produce signals driving the motors. Secondly, the motor parameters are obtained by system identification, and the controllers are designed based on these parameters. Finally, the numerical simulations are performed by incorporating the manipulator kinematics and the motor dynamics; the results are compared with those from the experiments. Both results show that they are in good agreement at steady state. There are two main contributions in this paper. One is the application of the model predictive control to the planar parallel manipulator, and the other one is to overcome the effects of the uncertainties of the DC motors and the performance of the position control due to the dynamic behavior of the manipulator.