Motion control of a robot with flexible joints

This paper presents an application example of a novel disturbance-rejection control method. The example considers a flexible-joint robot where actuator dynamics are considered. After a review and a discussion of the state of the art in controlling flexible-joint robots, the novel method is derived for the general case, and then applied to an example. The key feature of this method is to transform nonlinear effects (disturbances) acting on the system to where they can be estimated and statically compensated for. For these purposes, only a rough model knowledge and the position measurements are required. Simulation results show the superiority of the proposed method.