Disturbance Observer-Based Consensus Control for Multiple Robotic Manipulators

In this paper, a new distributed consensus control algorithm for multiple robotic manipulators is proposed. Comparing with the existing works, this paper studies the consensus problem of multiple robotic manipulators with unknown disturbances, and the consideration of unknown disturbances makes the dynamics model of the robotic manipulator more practical. Moreover, the disturbance observer (DO) is applied to obtain the estimation of unknown disturbance which can improve the robustness and anti-disturbance ability of the systems. There are N followers and one leader in multiple robotic manipulators systems and only a few followers can receive the information from the leader. Even if only the local information can be used to design the DO-based consensus control algorithm, the designed algorithm can steer all the followers to keep the same displacement with the leader finally. The consensus ability of the multiple robotic manipulators is proved. Simulation result is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.