Design and Control of a Hydraulic Simulator for a Flexible-Joint Robot

For the first time, a novel experimental hydraulic system that simulates joint flexibility of a single-rigid-link flexible-joint robot manipulator, with the ability of changing the joint flexibility's parameters, was designed and implemented in this study. Such a system could facilitate future control studies of robot manipulators by reducing investigation time and implementation cost of research. It could also be used to test the performance of different strategies to control the movement of flexible-joint manipulators. A hydraulic rotary servo motor was used to simulate the action of a flexible-joint robot manipulator, which was a challenging task, since the control of angular acceleration was required. In this study, a single-rigid-link elastic-joint robot manipulator was mathematically modeled and implemented in which joint flexibility parameters such as stiffness and damping could be easily changed. This simulation is referred to as a 'function generator' to drive a hydraulic robot manipulator. In this study the desired angular acceleration of the manipulator was used as the input to the hydraulic rotary motor and the objective was to make the hydraulic system follow the desired acceleration in the frequency range specified. A hydraulic actuator robot was built and tested. The results indicated that if the input signal had a frequency in the range of 5-15 Hz and damping ratio of 0.1 (typical values for flexible joints), the experimental setup was able to reproduce the input signal with acceptable accuracy. Owing to the inherent noise associated with the measurement of acceleration and some severe nonlinearities in the rotary motor, control of the experimental test system using classical methods was a challenging task that had not been anticipated. (c) Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden and The Robotics Society of Japan, 2009