Ricerc@Sapienza

In recent years, the evolution of artificial intelligence techniques has widely grown such that it gives new ways to improve human life, not only at work but also living. Nowadays, to the human being, physical human-robot interactions (PHRIs) have been presented very important and present itself as a major challenge for the current engineering. Therefore, this work designs and analyses a two-degree-of-freedom robotic arm with flexible joints driven by a DC motor. Due to the interaction between the robot links and flexible joints, the arm may present overshoots when it is moved such that it becomes difficult to manipulate the arm. Therefore, Magnetorheological dampers (MR damper or MR brake) are attached to the links of the arm in order to control such overshoot and provide a way to adjust the mechanical limitations of the arm. The dynamics of the system will be investigated, showing the appearance of chaotic behavior due to the coupling of the manipulator to the motors. After that, the feedback control is obtained through the state-dependent Riccati equation (SDRE) aiming the control of the positioning of the manipulator and the torque applied on the MR damper. Numerical results showed that the proposed control using hybrid actuators, DC motor, and MR brake was effective to control the position and behavior of the flexible joints of the manipulators.