Accurate control position of belt drives under acceleration and velocity constraints

Abstract

Belt drives provide freedom to position the motor relative to the load and this phenomenon enables reduction of the robot arm inertia. It also facilitates quick response when employed in robotics. Unfortunately, the flexible dynamics deteriorates the positioning accuracy. Therefore, there exists a trade-off between the simplicity of the control strategy to reject time varying disturbance caused by flexibility of the belt and precision in performance. Resonance of the system further leads to vibrations and poor accuracy in positioning. In this paper, accurate positioning of a belt driven mechanism using a feed-forward compensator under maximum acceleration and velocity constraints is proposed. The proposed method plans the desired trajectory and modifies it to compensate delay dynamics and vibration. Being an offline method, the proposed method could be easily and effectively adopted to the existing systems without any modification of the hardware setup. The effectiveness of the proposed method was proven by experiments carried out with an actual belt driven system. The accuracy of the simulation study based on numerical methods was also verified with the analytical solutions derived.