Contouring Control of a 5-DOF Dual-Arm Robot for Machining Based on Equivalent Errors

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to study the dynamics of a 5-DOF dual-arm robot and its holonomic constraints during grasping a workpiece and to design the contouring controller for machining. With the constraints addressed by utilizing the existing forward kinematics of the left and right arms, the system dynamics can be represented by only the joint space of the prime arm (the left-sided one). On the other hand, the contouring controller is designed based on the method of equivalent errors. For comparison, the numerical results performed by two controllers: (1) an integral sliding mode controller based on the method of equivalent error and (2) a distributed controller, are conducted. The results show that the contouring performance of the proposed controller is much better than those by the distributed controller, verifying the effectiveness of the proposed method.