Performance optimized H∞ control of industrial robot manipulators

In this paper, the design of a position tracking control scheme for an industrial robot manipulator is considered. The design is based on the normalized left coprirne factors robust stabilization approach. By coupling this H_∞ synthesis technique to a sequential quadratic programming optimization procedure, a systematic design method for the optimization of the controller´s performance is developed. Further, the role of the nominal model, which serves as the basis of the design, is also explored. The control scheme is successfully implemented and tested on a real industrial robot manipulator. The computed controller has worked immediately in the first experiments without any further tuning and shows excellent robust performance superior to that of the existing PID controllers.