The purpose of this paper is to study the dynamic modeling and controller design for the series element actuator (SEA) joints. The robot equipped with SEA joints is a strong coupling, nonlinear, highly flexible system, which can prevent itself from damaging by the accidental impact and the people to be injured by the robot.
Based on the torque source model, the authors built a dynamic model for the SEA joint. To improve the accuracy of this model, the authors designed an elastic element into the joint and implemented the vector control for the joint motor. A control method of combined PD controller and back-stepping was proposed. Moreover, the torque control could be transformed into position control by stiffness transformation.
The established model and the proposed method are verified by the position and torque control experiments. The experimental results show that the dynamic model of the SEA joint is accurate and the proposed control strategies for the SEA joint are reasonable and feasible.
The main contribution of the paper is as follows: designing an elastic element with high linearity to improve the model accuracy of the SEA joint. The control strategy-based back-stepping method for the SEA joint is proposed to increase the robustness of the controller.
