Disturbance Observer-Based Force Estimation and Fault Detection for Robotic Manipulator in Radioactive Environments

Robotic systems with force sensing have great potential for use in radioactive environments. In this study, a modified observer-based method was developed to calculate the unknown external force without adding a redundant sensor and achieve the fault detection in the presence of a force sensor. A dynamic model of a serial robotic manipulator was built and the design procedure for a modified disturbance observer (MDO) was established. The output of observer was then used to suppress the disturbance and generate the fault signature. Moreover, the stability analysis shows that the convergence of the observer error is ultimately bounded. Simulation results under the step and composite sinusoidal disturbance torque demonstrate the performance of the force estimation and disturbance rejection. The results, obtained using the Kinova Jaco2 robot manipulator, show that the estimated errors of the external force in X-Y-Z direction are bounded within ±0.5 N, ±2 N, and ±3 N, respectively. Finally, the effectiveness of fault detection is also verified by the experiment results.