This paper describes the design of H-infinity controller for robust control of a DC motor system. The suggested controller can ensure robustness against disturbance and model uncertainty by minimizing H-infinity norm of the transfer function from exogenous input to performance output and applying the small gain theorem. In particular, the controller was designed to reduce the effects of disturbance and model uncertainty simultaneously by formalizing these problems as a mixed sensitivity problem. The validity of the proposed controller was demonstrated by computer simulations and real experiments. Moreover, the effectiveness of the proposed controller was confirmed by comparing its performance with PI controller, which was tested under the same experimental condition as the H-infinity controller.

This paper deals with the disturbance observer (DOB) based sliding mode control (SMC) for a DC motor to control motor rotating speed precisely and to ensure strong robustness against disturbance including load torque and parameter variation. The reason of steady state error in speed on conventional SMC without DOB is analyzed in detail. Especially, the suggested DOB is designed to prevent measuring noise and harmonics caused by derivative operation on rotating speed. The control performance of the DOB based SMC is evaluated by the various simulations. The simulation results showed that the DOB based SMC had more robust performance than the SMC system without DOB. Especially, precise speed control was possible even though motor parameter variation and load torque was added to the system.

Smart Door(SD) is a human friendly power-assisted door system for passenger car doors. It offers comfort and safety to passengers and drivers by supplying additional power. In this study, dynamic system model and the equation of motion derivation are derived. And we propose the disturbance observer based collision detection algorithm for safety when opening the door. A disturbance caused by collision has a fast response compared to a friction, uncertainties and so on. The main idea this study is to estimate a variation of disturbance for stably and effectively detecting a collision. In order to evaluate a performance of collision detection, an experiment set up is constructed. The experimental results validate the usefulness of the proposed collision detection algorithm.

The backdrivable servovalve is a desirable component for force and interaction control of hydraulic actuation systems because it provides direct force generation mechanical impedance reduction by its own inherent backdrivability. However, high parametric uncertainty and friction effects inside the hydraulic actuation system significantly degrade its advantage. To solve this problem, this letter presents a disturbance-adaptive robust internal-loop compensator (DA-RIC) to generate ideal interactive control performance from the backdrivable-servovalve-based system. The proposed control combines a robust internal-loop compensator structure (RIC) with an explicit disturbance estimator designed for asymptotic disturbance tracking, such that the controlled system provide stable and ideal dynamic behavior for impedance control, while completely compensating the disturbance effects. With the aid of a backdrivable servovalve, we show that the proposed control structure can be implemented based on a simplified nominal model, and the controller enables implementation without accurate knowledge of the target system parameters and disturbances. The performance and properties of the proposed controller are verified by simulation and experiments.

In this paper, we propose a new collision detection algorithm for human-robot collaboration. We use an IMU sensor located at the tip of the manipulator and the kinematic behavior of the manipulator to detect the unexpected collision between the robotic manipulator and environment. Unlike other method, the developed algorithm uses only the kinematic relationship between the manipulator joint and the end effector. Therefore, the collision estimation signal is not affected by the error of the dynamics model. The proposed collision detection algorithm detects the collision by comparing the estimated acceleration of the end effector derived from the position, velocity and acceleration trajectories of the robot joints with the actual acceleration measured by the sensor. In simulation, we compare the performance of our method with the conventional Residual Observer (ROB). Our method is less sensitive to the load variation because of the independency on the dynamic modeling of the manipulator.

The final aim of our research project is a study on assessment of automatic steering system of ships in open seas. In order to achieve this aim, we need to know the characteristics of each component of the system, and also to know the characteristics of disturbance to ship dynamics. In this paper, we provide calculation method of irregular disturbance to ships in autopilot navigation in open seas, and also show calculation examples about two kinds of ship, ore carrier and fishing boat. The disturbance consists of irregular wave and random wind. The disturbance is calculated as equivalent yaw angular velocity. Each spectrum and time history of disturbance are reasonably evaluated. Further investigation concerning to performance index of autopilot system and energy loss related to automatic course keeping, will be dealt with in another paper.