Robotic manipulators may be subject to different types of disturbances such as unknown payloads, unmodeled dynamics, and environment interaction forces. Observing these unknown disturbances in robotic manipulators is fundamental in many robotic applications such as disturbance rejection and sensorless force control. In this paper, a novel disturbance observer (DOB) is introduced based on the insights from the finite-time observer (FTO) and robot dynamics. Different from the traditional DOBs, this new observer can provide the capability to track the disturbance within a finite time. The performance of the presented observer is verified by two kinds of typical disturbances for a two-link manipulator with a comparison with several existing DOBs. The simulation results show the rapidity and accuracy of the proposed FTO.
Keywords: disturbance observer; estimation; finite-time observer; human-robot interaction; robotic manipulator.