A two stage robot control for liquid transfer

Abstract

A control design scheme is proposed for sloshing suppression during liquid transfer using robotic manipulators. The container of the liquid is transferred by an articulated manipulator. The motion of the liquid is approximated using the well-known pendulum-type model. The proposed control scheme combines a partial inverse dynamics controller with a PID controller tuned with a "metaheuristic" search algorithm. The proposed controller exploits measurements of the manipulator and the container position and velocity variables, but does not require measurements of the pendulum's position and velocity. The proposed design technique succeeds to sufficiently suppress liquid sloshing within the container, while dealing with practical problems like the lack of measurements of the liquid's motion within the tank.