Contour tracking control for multi-DOF robotic manipulators

In this paper, a new position domain PD control is proposed to control a multi-DOF nonlinear robotic manipulator for the purpose of improving contour tracking performance. To develop this new position domain control system, a robotic manipulator is treated as a master-slave system where the master motion is used as an independent reference through equidistantly sampling, while slave motions are described as functions of the master motion according to contour tracking requirements. A position domain dynamic model of the robotic manipulator is developed by transforming the original dynamic model developed in time domain to position domain. One benefit of this developed position domain PD control is that there is no tracking error for the master motion and only the tracking error of slave motions will affect the contour tracking performance. Stability analysis is conducted for the proposed position domain control, and it is successfully verified the good contour tracking performance through simulation study.