AUTOMATIC SENSOR FRAME IDENTIFICATION IN INDUSTRIAL ROBOTS WITH JOINT ELASTICITY

For robots with joint elasticity, discrepancies exist between the motor side information and the load side (i.e., end-effector) information. Therefore, high tracking performance at the load side can hardly be achieved when the estimate of load side information is inaccurate. To minimize such inaccuracies, it is desired to calibrate the load side sensor (in particular, the exact sensor location). In practice, the optimal placement of the load side sensor often varies due to the task variation necessitating frequent sensor calibrations. This frequent calibration need requires significant effort and hence is not preferable for industries which have relatively short product cycles. To solve this problem, this paper presents a sensor frame identification algorithm to automate this calibration process for the load side sensor, in particular the accelerometer. We formulate the calibration problem as a nonlinear estimation problem with unknown parameters. The Expectation-Maximization algorithm is utilized to decouple the state estimation and the parameter estimation into two separated optimization problems. An overall dual-phase learning structure associated with the proposed approach is also studied. Experiments are designed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.