A Saturation-Aware Trajectory-Based Explicit Reference Governor for a Robotic Arm

As with all actuated mechanical systems, the development of a control scheme for robotic systems must take actuator saturation into account. Furthermore, in order to properly control a robotic arm, other types of mechanical limitations must also be considered (e.g. limited operating range of the joint, speed limitations). In this paper, we propose a saturation-aware trajectory-based Explicit Reference Governor, a lightweight constrained control scheme with no online optimization. Additionally, we tested the effectiveness of the proposed control architecture on a 7 degree-of-freedom KUKA LBR IIWA14 R820. Both the performance and the computational time of our proposed solution were tested against other constrained control solutions available in the literature.