Identification of Coupled Elastic Dynamics Using Inverse Eigenvalue Theory

In this paper we present a new method for identification of robot manipulators with coupled inertia dynamics. The main contributions of the work are a) The parameters of a mechanical mass-spring-coupled masses equivalent of any order with coupled mass-terms are identified given only partial state information. b) The method is fully automatic with no operator input and can be applied in the field to update the dynamic model parameters. The approach is particularly useful when the robot operators mount flexible tooling or equipment on the robot arms. c) In the paper we combine an important result from the vibration literature, with the solution of inverse eigenvalue problems. The main advantage of the method compared to other identification methods is the fact that the mechanical structure is exploited and that only motor encoder position and torque are required to identify the springs, masses and coupled masses of an Nth order system.