Observer Based Sensorless Rorce Control of Robot Manipulator

In this paper, a force estimation method is proposed for the sensorless force control. For this, a disturbance observer is applied to each joint of an n degrees of freedom manipulator to obtain a simple equivalent robot dynamics(SERD) being represented as an n independent double integrator system. To estimate the output of disturbance observer in the absence of external force, the observer estimator is designed, where the uncertain parameters of the robot manipulator are adjusted by gradient method to minimize the output between the disturbance observer and the observer estimator. When the external force is exerted, the external force is estimated using the difference between the output of disturbance observer which include the external torque signal and that of observer estimator. And then, a force controller is designed for force feedback control employing the estimated force signal. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed force estimation method, several numerical examples are illustrated for the 2-axis planar type robot manipulator.