Robust Flat Filtering Control of a Nonlinear Manipulator-Direct Current Motor System

This paper presents a linear robust output reference trajectory tracking controller, addressed here as a flat filtering controller (FFC), for nonlinear differentially flat systems. Here, we illustrate the controller's performance, via digital computer simulations and, also, via laboratory experiments, carried out on a single link-direct current (DC) motor driven robot manipulator undergoing a reference trajectory tracking task. The proposed linear FFC only requires the output to be regulated of the composite system and none of the internal states of the resulting third-order nonlinear system. The controller is designed on the basis of a drastic simplification of the combined single link-DC motor dynamics to a, perturbed, third-order pure integration system. This demonstrates the robustness of the proposed scheme with respect to ignored nonlinear state-dependent, endogenous, disturbances and, also, to independent unstructured exogenous disturbances inevitable in an experimental setup. Simulation and experimental results, as well as comparisons with other controllers, are presented.