Adaptive hierarchical positioning error compensation for long-term service of industrial robots based on incremental learning with fixed-length memory window and incremental model reconstruction

•An active evaluating mechanism is established to characterize the change of error level by the change of pose coordinates, as well as to actively verify, optimize and even reconstruct pose mapping model.•An incremental learning algorithm with fixed-length memory window (FIL) is designed to optimize the mapping model in terms of parameters.•An incremental model reconstruction (IMR) is designed to optimize the mapping model in terms of architecture, and thus improving the stability and sustainability of the pose mapping model. Industrial robots have been extensively used in industry, however, geometric errors mainly caused by connecting rod parameter error and non-geometric errors caused by deflection and friction, etc., limit its application in high-accuracy machining. Aiming at addressing these two types of errors, parametric methods for error compensation based on the kinematic model and non-parametric methods of directly establishing the mapping relationship between the actual and target poses of the robot end-effector are investigated and proposed. Currently both types of methods are mainly offline and will be no longer applicable when the pose of the end-effector in the workspace changes dramatically or the working performance of the robot degrades. Thus, to compensate the positioning error of an industrial robot during long-term operation, this research proposes an adaptive hierarchical compensation method based on fixed-length memory window incremental learning and incremental model reconstruction. Firstly, the correlation between positioning errors and robot poses is studied, a calibration sample library is created, and thus the actively evaluating mechanism of the pose mapping model is established to overcome the problem of the robot’ workspace having a differential distribution of error levels. Then, an incremental learning algorithm with fixed-length memory window and an incremental model reconstruction algorithm are designed to optimize the pose mapping model in terms of its parameters and architecture and overcome the problem that the performance degradation of the robot exacerbates the positioning error and affects the applicability of the pose mapping model, ensuring that the pose mapping model runs stably above the target accuracy level. Finally, the proposed method is applied to the long-term compensation case of a Stäubli industrial robot and a UR robot, and compared to state-of-art methods. Verification results show the proposed method r