18 May 2020 –

Up until today, joint friction compensation poses a fundamental challenge for robotics control, as high friction losses directly influence the performance of the robot and its sensitive interaction with its environment.

Scientists of the DLR-Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics work intensively on this issue and have presented the results of their research works in a scientific publication. The paper tackles the problem of friction compensation, without using a friction model. The special feature of the proposed friction observer is that the asymptotic stability and passivity of the controller are maintained. Another advantage is that it provides a clear understanding for the stiction compensation which is hard to capture in model-free approaches. Simulations and experiments validating the proposed scheme round off the paper.

The paper was published in December of 2019 in the journal IEEE Transactions on Robotics (Volume 35, Issue 6). The journal reports on research and applications in the field of robotics and was the number one most-cited journal for topics related to robotics in 2003.

You can find the paper under:

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8781838