This paper presents an approach of the force/position hybrid control for a hexa parallel robot to guarantee a safe and accurate interaction when touching the object surface. A double-loop PID controller is proposed to replace the common PID controller in the position control to eliminate position errors due to the dynamics coupling effect between the arms and the vibration of the mechanical system. An impedance control model is used to guarantee a safe and accurate interaction when touching the object surface. In addition, a gradient descent iterative learning control algorithm is used and modified to determine the optimal impedance parameters in unknown environments. A model of the robot is built in SimMechanics to simulate and estimate system parameters. After that, the experimental work was conducted on a real robot to verify the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method. INDEX TERMS Hybrid control, Hexa robot, impedance control, double-loop PID, iterative learning.

Multi-objective optimizations were conducted for a compressor station comprising two dissimilar compressor units driven by two dissimilar gas turbines, two coolers of different size, and two parallel pipeline sections to the next station. Genetic Algorithms were used in this optimization along with detailed models of the performance characteristics of gas turbines, compressors, aerial coolers, and downstream pipeline section. Essential in these models is the heat transfer between the gas and soil as it affects the pressure drop along the pipeline, and hence relates back to the coolers and compressor flow/pressure settings. Further investigative techniques were developed to refine the methodology as well as to minimize the downstream gas temperature at the suction of the next station. Current operating conditions at the station were compared to the optimized settings, showing that there is room for improving the efficiency of operation (i.e. lower energy consumption) with minimum effort on the station control strategy. Two threshold throughput conditions were determined in so far as single vs. multi-unit operations due to the dissimilarity in the compressor units and associated gas turbine drivers. The results showed that savings in the energy consumption in the order of 5–6% is achievable with slight adjustment to unit load sharing and coolers by-pass/fan speed selections. It appears that most of the savings (around 70–75%) are derived from optimizing the load sharing between the two parallel compressors, while the balance of the savings is realized from optimizing the aerial coolers settings. In particular, operating the aerial coolers at 50% fan speed (if permitted) could lead to substantial savings in electric energy consumption in some cases.

This paper presents a novel architecture of the vision/position hybrid control for a Hexa parallel robot. The 3D vision system is combined with the Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) position controller to form a two-level closed-loop controller of the robot. The 3D vision system measures the pose of the end-effector after the PID control. The measurement of the 3D vision system is used as a feedback of the second closed-loop control. The 3D vision system has a simple structure using two fixed symmetric cameras at the top of the robot and four planar colored markers on the surface of the end-effector. The 3D vision system detects and reconstructs the 3D coordinates of colored markers. Based on the distance and coplanarity constraints of the colored markers, the optimization problem is modeled for the real-time adjustment, which is implemented during the operation of the robot to minimize the measurement error of the 3D vision system due to both the initial calibration of the stereo camera and the external noise affecting image processing. The bacterial foraging optimization is appropriately configured to solve the optimization problem. The experiment is performed on a specific Hexa parallel robot to assess the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed real-time adjustment using the bacterial foraging optimization. The experimental result shows that it has high accuracy and fast computation time although the experiment is conducted on a laptop with an average hardware configuration. An experimental comparison of the performance between the proposed method and another control method is also implemented. The results show the superiority and application potential of the proposed method.

One of the problems with industrial robots is their ability to accurately locate the pose of the end-effector. Over the years, many other solutions have been studied including static calibration and dynamic positioning. This paper presents a novel approach for pose estimation of a Hexa parallel robot. The vision system uses three simple color feature points fixed on the surface of the end-effector to measure the pose of the robot. The Intel RealSense Camera D435i is used as a 3D measurement of feature points, which offers a cheap solution and high accuracy in positioning. Based on the constraint of three color feature points, the pose of the end-effector, including position and orientation, is determined. A dynamic hybrid filter is designed to correct the vision-based pose measurement. The complementary filter is used to eliminate the noise of image processing due to environmental light source interference. The unscented Kalman filter is designed to smooth out the pose estimation of the vision system based on robot’s kinematic parameters. The combination of two filters in the same control scheme contributes to increased stability and improved accuracy of robot’s positioning. The simulation, experiment, and comparison demonstrate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method.