Position Domain Synchronization Control For Robotic Manipulators

Developed in this thesis is a new control law focusing on the improvement of contour tracking of robotic manipulators. The new control scheme is a hybrid controller based on position domain control (PDC) and position synchronization control (PSC). On PDC, the system’s dynamics are transformed from time domain to position domain via a one-to-one mapping and the position of the master axis motion is used as reference instead of time. The elimination of the reference motion from the control input improves contouring performance relative to time domain controllers. Conversely, PSC seeks to reduce the error of the systems by diminishing the synchronization error between each agent of the system. The new control law utilizes the aforementioned techniques to maximize the contour performance. The Lyapunov method was used to prove the proposed controller’s stability. The new control law was compared to existing control schemes via simulations of linear and nonlinear contours, and was shown to provide good tracking and contouring performances.