Disturbance Observer-assisted Trajectory Tracking Control for Surgical Robot Manipulator

This paper attempts to control the motion of a surgical robot to perform surgeries in an accurate and precise manner. In the target robot, two revolute joints, one prismatic joint and one revolute joint are connected in series, i.e. the 2PRP configuration. The external disturbances on the 2PRP robot were estimated, and the dynamic modelling of the robot was performed using the Newton-Euler formulation. Then, a control system was designed to control the robot motion by the torque computed based on the data collected by the disturbance observer, which compensates for the disturbance-induced error. The surgical robot and control system were simulated in MATLAB/Simulink. The results show that the designed control system can effectively compensate for the position error and control the robot motion in surgeries. © 2019 Lavoisier. All rights reserved.