An ANN-Based Precision Compensation Method for Industrial Manipulators via Optimization of Point Selection

Industrial manipulators are widely used in the manufacture of products due to their high flexibility and low costs. High absolute positioning accuracy is the key to guarantee the product quality, which is commonly improved through the error compensation technology. Due to the variety, complexity, and unpredictability of the error sources, the influence of the nongeometric errors on the absolute positioning accuracy of manipulators is uncertain. In result, the existing error compensation methods are difficult to obtain satisfying results, especially for manipulators with large joint flexibility that need to work in different task scenarios. In this paper, an artificial neural network- (ANN-) based precision compensation method via optimization of point selection is proposed, which deals with the kinematic errors and joint stiffness errors in different task scenarios. Firstly, the quasi-random sequence (QRS) method and the product of exponentials (POE) model are combined to identify and compensate the geometric parameters. The QRS method can select points evenly in the workspace. And the POE model can avoid the singularity problem of Denavit–Hartenberg (DH) model. Secondly, a continuous joint stiffness compensation model in the whole workspace is established through ANN. In order to get better compensation results for the current task scenario, the point selection method based on trajectory similarity is adopted to determine the training data of ANN. Finally, the experiments are conducted on a 6-DOF industrial manipulator to demonstrate the validity of the proposed method. The results show that the ANN-based method via optimization of point selection could be an effective solution for the precision compensation.