Performance analysis of relay feedback position regulators for manipulators with Coulomb friction

The purpose of the paper is to analyze the performance of several global position regulators for robot manipulators with Coulomb friction. All the controllers include a proportional-differential part and a switched part whereas the difference between the controllers is in the way of compensation of the gravitational forces. Stability analysis is also revisited within the nonsmooth Lyapunov function framework for the controllers with and without gravity pre-compensation. Performance issues of the proposed controllers are evaluated in an experimental study of a five degrees-of-freedom robot manipulator. In the experiments, we choose two criteria for performance analysis. In the first set of experiments, we set the same gains to all the controllers. In the second set of experiments, the gains of the controller were chosen such that the work done by the manipulator is similar.