LAUSR

The actuator dead zone of free-form surface grinding robots (FFSGRs) is very common in the grinding process and has a great impact on the grinding quality of a workpiece. In this paper, an improved trajectory tracking algorithm for an FFSGR with an asymmetric actuator dead zone was proposed with consideration of friction forces, model uncertainties, and external disturbances. The presented control algorithm was based on the machine learning and sliding mode control (SMC) methods. The control compensator used neural networks to estimate the actuator’s dead zone and eliminate its effects. The robust SMC compensator acted as an auxiliary controller to guarantee the system’s stability and robustness under circumstances with model uncertainties, approximation errors, and friction forces. The stability of the closed-loop system and the asymptotic convergence of tracking errors were evaluated using Lyapunov theory. The simulation results showed that the dead zone’s non-linearity can be estimated correctly, and satisfactory trajectory tracking performance can be obtained in this way, since the influences of the actuator’s dead zone were eliminated. The convergence time of the system was reduced from 1.1 to 0.8 s, and the maximum steady-state error was reduced from 0.06 to 0.015 rad. In the grinding experiment, the joint steady-state error decreased by 21%, which proves the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed control method.