Abstract
Electromechanical systems usually have an innate backlash in their gear trains which is normally nonlinear and limits the performance of the system. In this paper, a disturbance observer is designed in order to estimate the properties of the backlash. Generally, such disturbance observers are designed with the inverse model of the nominal plant but since the backlash is an internal factor of the plant, its effect cannot be separated from the system output. In the proposed model, the plant is reconfigured to separate the effects of the backlash from the output, and a new type of disturbance observer is proposed to detect and compensate for the backlash in the remodelled plant. The suggested disturbance observer is applied to the knee joint of a humanoid robot. Using the proposed disturbance observer, it is shown that the backlash can be compensated for, and that the tracking error decreases in the knee pitch trajectory. Also, an error analysis of the input trajectory is carried out to verify the performance of the proposed disturbance observer and the validity of the proposed control scheme is discussed.
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Recommended by Editorial Board member Dong Hwan Kim under the direction of Editor Jae-Bok Song. This work was supported by the Inha University and National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MEST) (No. 2007-0056386).
Min-Jung Kang received her M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Inha University in 2009. She is currently a researcher with the Department of R&D, Taechang N.E.T of Bucheon, Korea. Her research interests are in areas of application of mobile robots, intelligent control, control of wind turbine.
Jong-Hun Park received his M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Inha University in 2004. He is now pursuing a Ph.D. degree in the Department of Robot Engineering, Inha University, Incheon, Korea. His current research interests include path planning and Robotics.
Jin-Hwan Kim received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Inha University in 1993 and 1996, respectively. He is currently a professor with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Inha Technical College of Incheon, Korea. His research interests are in the areas of design of fuzzy controller and application of mobile robots.
Uk-Youl Huh received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Seoul University in 1974, 1978, and 1982, respectively. He is currently a professor with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Inha University, Incheon, Korea. His research interests are in the areas of intelligent control, fuzzy controller design and its application to mobile robot.
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Kang, MJ., Park, JH., Kim, JH. et al. A disturbance observer design for backlash compensation. Int. J. Control Autom. Syst. 9, 742–749 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12555-011-0416-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12555-011-0416-8