Time delay control of hydraulic manipulators with continuous nonsingular terminal sliding mode

For the position tracking control of hydraulic manipulators,a novel method of time delay control(TDC) with continuous nonsingular terminal sliding mode(CNTSM) was proposed in this work.Complex dynamics of the hydraulic manipulator is approximately canceled by time delay estimation(TDE),which means the proposed method is model-free and no prior knowledge of the dynamics is required.Moreover,the CNTSM term with a fast-TSM-type reaching law ensures fast convergence and high-precision tracking control performance under heavy lumped uncertainties.Despite its considerable robustness against lumped uncertainties,the proposed control scheme is continuous and chattering-free and no pressure sensors are required in practical applications.Theoretical analysis and experimental results show that faster and higher-precision position tracking performance is achieved compared with the traditional CNTSM-based TDC method using boundary layers.

Compliance motion control of the hydraulic dual-arm manipulator with adaptive mass estimation of unknown object

Given the limited operating ability of a single robotic arm,dual-arm collaborative operations have become increasingly prominent.Compared with the electrically driven dual-arm manipulator,due to the unknown heavy load,difficulty in measuring contact forces,and control complexity during the closed-chain object transportation task,the hydraulic dual-arm manipulator(HDM)faces more difficulty in accurately tracking the desired motion trajectory,which may cause object deformation or even breakage.To overcome this problem,a compliance motion control method is proposed in this paper for the HDM.The mass parameter of the unknown object is obtained by using an adaptive method based on velocity error.Due to the difficulty in obtaining the actual internal force of the object,the pressure signal from the pressure sensor of the hydraulic system is used to estimate the contact force at the end-effector(EE)of two hydraulic manipulators(HMs).Further,the estimated contact force is used to calculate the actual internal force on the object.Then,a compliance motion controller is designed for HDM closed-chain collaboration.The position and internal force errors of the object are reduced by the feedback of the position,velocity,and internal force errors of the object to achieve the effect of the compliance motion of the HDM,i.e.,to reduce the motion error and internal force of the object.The required velocity and force at the EE of the two HMs,including the position and internal force errors of the object,are inputted into separate position controllers.In addition,the position controllers of the two individual HMs are designed to enable precise motion control by using the virtual decomposition control method.Finally,comparative experiments are carried out on a hydraulic dual-arm test bench.The proposed method is validated by the experimental results,which demonstrate improved object position accuracy and reduced internal force.

Development of a redundant anthropomorphic hydraulically actuated manipulator with a roll-pitch-yaw spherical wrist

The demand for redundant hydraulic manipulators that can implement complex heavy-duty tasks in unstructured areas is increasing;however,current manipulator layouts that remarkably differ from human arms make intuitive kinematic operation challenging to achieve.This study proposes a seven-degree-of-freedom(7-DOF)redundant anthropomorphic hydraulically actuated manipulator with a novel roll-pitch-yaw spherical wrist.A hybrid series-parallel mechanism is presented to achieve the spherical wrist design,which consists of two parallel linear hydraulic cylinders to drive the yaw/pitch 2-DOF wrist plate connected serially to the roll structure.Designed as a 1R£RRR-1S£U mechanism(“R”,“P”,“S”,and“U”denote revolute,prismatic,spherical,and universal joints,respectively;the underlined letter indicates the active joint),the 2-DOF parallel structure is partially decoupled to obtain simple forward/inverse kinematic solutions in which a closed-loop subchain“R£RR”is included.The 7-DOF manipulator is then designed,and its third joint axis goes through the spherical center to obtain closed-form inverse kinematic computation.The analytical inverse kinematic solution is drawn by constructing self-motion manifolds.Finally,a physical prototype is developed,and the kinematic analysis is validated via numerical simulation and test results.

A framework to develop and test a model-free motion control system for a forestry crane

This article has the objective of presenting our method to develop and test a motion control system for a heavy-duty hydraulically actuated manipulator,which is part of a newly developed prototype featuring a fully-autonomous unmanned forestry machine.This control algorithm is based on functional analysis and differential algebra,under the concepts of a new type of approach known as model-free intelligent PID control(iPID).As it can be unsafe to test this form of control directly on real hardware,our main contribution is to introduce a framework for developing and testing control software.This framework incorporates a desktop-size mockup crane equipped with comparable hardware as the real one,which we design and manufactured using 3D-printing.This downscaled mechatronic system allows to safely test the implementation of control software in real-time hardware directly on our desks,prior to the actual testing on the real machine.The results demonstrate that this development framework is useful to safely test control software for heavy-duty systems,and it helped us present the first experiments with the world’s first unmanned forestry machine capable of performing fully autonomous forestry tasks.