Velocity field control of a class of electrically-driven manipulators

This article addresses the control of robotic manipulators under the assumption that the desired motion in the operational space is encoded through a velocity field. In other words, a vectorial function assigns a velocity vector to each point in the robot workspace. Thus, the control objective is to design a control input such that the actual operational space velocity of the robot end-effector asymptotically tracks the desired velocity from the velocity field. This control formulation is known in the literature as velocity field control. A new velocity field controller together with a rigorous stability analysis is introduced in this article. The controller is developed for a class of electrically-driven manipulators. In this class of manipulators, the passivity property from the servo-amplifier voltage input to the joint velocity is not satisfied. However, global exponential stability of the state space origin of the closed-loop system is proven. Furthermore, the closed-loop system is proven to be and output strictly passive map from an auxiliary input to a filtered error signal. To confirm the theoretical conclusions, a detailed experimental study in a two degrees-of-freedom direct-drive manipulator is provided. Particularly, experiments consist of comparing the performance of a simple PI controller and a high-gain PI controller with respect to the new control scheme.