On the dynamic control of a hydraulic large range robot for construction applications

There are various important outdoor applications in the fields of civil engineering, environmental technology or catastrophy management which require the introduction of a large range robot. In collaboration with industrial partners the KfK has developed such Extended Multi joInt Robot (EMIR) which is driven by hydraulic actuators. The position control of EMIR is a tough problem due to the extreme nonlinearities of the kinematics and hydraulic actuators as well as the remarkable elasticities of the mechanics and hydraulics. In the first part of this paper a realistic physically transparent model of the robot will be presented. In the second part different suitable control concepts based on the model will be discussed.