Saturated proportional derivative control of a single-link flexible-joint manipulator

This paper considers the control of a single-link flexible-joint robot manipulator subject to actuator saturation. Alternative controllers are proposed and compared to one found in literature. In particular, a controller with proportional and derivative components is guaranteed to provide a total torque less than a chosen value, thereby disallowing actuator saturation. It is shown that an equilibrium point of the closed-loop system is asymptotically stable. Additionally, it is shown that the controllers are robust to modelling errors. Finally, this paper presents simulation results demonstrating the performance of the proposed control architecture.