Lyapunov-Based Nonlinear Disturbance Observer for Serial n-Link Robot Manipulators

In this paper we extend the work done by Chen et al. (IEEE Trans Ind Electron 47(4):932-938, 2000) which proposed a nonlinear disturbance observer for two-link robot manipulators to n-link robot manipulators. A general form of dynamic equations of serial n-link robot manipulator is considered, and the stability analysis of the proposed observer is performed by using Lyapunov's direct method. Although it seems that the formulation of disturbance observer is easy to derive, choosing the disturbance observer gain to guarantee stability is really hard. In this paper it is shown that the design parameter can be selected depends on the maximum velocity and physical parameters of robot manipulator to guarantee the global asymptotic stability of the disturbance observer. Using this nonlinear disturbance observer, no accurate dynamic model is required to achieve high precision motion control, because it makes the system robust against internal disturbances such as unmodeled dynamics and external disturbances such as friction in joints. The effectiveness of the proposed observer is investigated by numerical simulation for three-Dofs robot manipulator. In fact, controller with disturbance observer has more superior tracking performance, with a wide range of payloads and in the presence of friction in joints. It is also found that, although the proposed observer is designed for slow varying disturbances, it can estimate rapid time varying disturbances very well.