Control of liquid handling robotic systems: A feed-forward approach to suppress sloshing

Abstract

This paper presents a feed-forward approach to reduce sloshing dynamics in liquid handling robotic systems. According to our solution, the dynamics of a liquid into an open vessel manipulated by a robot can be described by means of a spherical pendulum mechanical model. By doing this, the sloshing problem can be addressed as a vibration suppression problem for a second order system. More in details, the pendulum model is utilized to tune an exponential filter which shapes the reference trajectory for the robot, thus achieving a sloshing-free motion of the liquid inside the vessel.