Integration of saturated PI synchronous control and PD feedback for control of parallel manipulators

High-precision motion of parallel manipulators depends not only on the position accuracy of each actuator, but also on the position synchronization of all actuators. This paper presents a simple synchronized control algorithm for the setpoint position control of parallel manipulators, by incorporating cross-coupling technology into a common proportional-derivative (PD) control architecture. An integrated controller is developed, consisting of a PD control and a saturated proportional-integral (S-PI) control with feedback of the differential position errors amongst actuators (defined as the synchronization errors). The controller can stabilize the motion of each actuator, and meanwhile synchronize all actuators' motions so that both position and synchronization errors converge to zero. The control algorithm does not use the modeling parameters in the controller formulation, and thus permits easy implementation in practice. It is proved that the proposed method can guarantee global asymptotical stability of the system. Experiments conducted on a planar three-degree-of-freedom parallel manipulator demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. © 2006 IEEE.