Design, Analysis, and Comparison of Control Strategies for an Industrial Robotic Arm Driven by a Multi-Level Inverter

In this article, we present the design and implementation of different control strategies for the position of a 2-Degree-of-Freedom (DoF) robotic arm, namely gain scheduling per trenches, gain scheduling by interpolation, adaptive control, and fuzzy logic. The first link of this robot is driven by an Alternating Current Brushless Permanent Magnet Motor (ACBPMM) through a three-phase multi-level inverter with 27 levels of voltage per phase. Thanks to the topologies offered by ACBPMMs and to the multi-level inverter, high commutation frequencies are reduced, as observed in the computer simulations. Additionally, to determine which proposed control strategies are the most suitable for an ACBPMM connected to a multi-level inverter, a comparative study on the performance of the controllers implemented for this robot is conducted. © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.