Robustness improvement of a nonlinear H∞ controller for robot manipulators via saturation functions

In this paper, previous works on nonlinear H-infinity control for robot manipulators are extended. In particular, integral terms are considered to cope with persistent disturbances, such as constant load at the end-effector. The extended controller may be understood as a computed-torque control with an external PID, whose gain matrices vary with the position and velocity of the robot joints. In addition, in order to increase the controller robustness, an extension of the algorithms with saturation functions has been carried out. This extension deals with the resulting nonlinear equation of the closed-loop error. A modified expression for the required increment in the control signal is provided, and the local closed-loop stability of this approach is discussed. Finally, simulation results for a two-link robot and experimental results for an industrial robot are presented. The results obtained with this technique have been compared with those attained with the original controllers to show the improvements achieved by means of the proposed method. (c) 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.