New online payload identification for flexible robots. Application to adaptive control

This work presents a new method for online payload identification of single-link flexible robots. Presented technique takes as inputs the measurements of the motor position and the coupling torque at the base of the beam measured by means of a strain gauge. With a simple and effective management of these data, we are able to accurately estimate the tip mass. Simulation results demonstrate the goodness of this technique. Subsequently, a proportional-derivative (PD) adaptive control scheme which uses the information from the identification method has been developed and a set of experiments have been carried out in a real platform.