Computed force and velocity control for spatial multi-DOF electro-hydraulic parallel manipulator

A novel dynamic trajectory tracking controller for spatial 6-DOF electro-hydraulic parallel manipulator considering system nonlinearity-computed force and velocity controller is proposed, with a view of improving the control performance with high computational efficiency of control algorithm. The dynamic model of electro-hydraulic parallel manipulator, both mechanical and hydraulic system, is described by using Kane and hydromechanics method. The requisite system states are estimated via forward kinematics based upon global Newton-Raphson with monotonic descent algorithms under the measured actuator position. The desired leg position and velocity required for the proposed controller are calculated by an analytical method corresponding to the desired generalized pose, and the desired driven force is computed with an effectively simplified inverse dynamics. Under feed-forward of the desired driven force and velocity, the computed force and velocity controller is developed with actual leg position as its feedback only, and the desired leg position, velocity and driven force as its input. The control performance of the proposed controller for multi-DOF parallel manipulator is evaluated in theory and experiment, especially for dynamic tracking performance. Experimental results show that the presented controller can greatly improve the dynamic trajectory tracking performance for high real time electro-hydraulic parallel manipulator. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.