In this work, a position control in task space for slider-crank mechanisms is presented. In order to apply linear controllers it is required to linearize the mechanism dynamics at an equilibrium point. However, complete dynamic knowledge is needed and the linearization technique gives an oversimplified model that affects the control performance. In this work, it is proposed a novel method to design task space controllers without using the complete knowledge of the mechanism dynamics and linearization methods. From the extended dynamic model of parallel robots, it can be seen that the end-effector (slider) dynamics is expressed as a linear system that can be used directly for the control design instead of the complete mechanism linear dynamics. The approach requires a minimal knowledge of the mechanism dynamics and avoids linearization methods. To verify our approach, it is used pole placement and sliding mode controllers whose gains are tuned according to the slider dynamics. A linear sensor is mounted at the slider to measure its position and avoids considering noise and disturbances at links before the slider. Simulations and experiments are presented to validate our approach using two kinds of slider-crank mechanisms.

Proportional-Derivative (PD) control is one of the most widely used controllers, especially for robot manipulators. When the robot presents gravitational terms, PD control cannot guarantee position convergence, therefore compensation is required such as PD with gravity compensation, PD+G. PD+G control requires knowledge of the gravitational term and there exist several results that prove global asymptotic stability. However, there is no method to tune the PD gains. In this work, a novel method to tune the PD+G controller is proposed. The tuning method is obtained using the global asymptotic stability result of the La Salle's theorem and robot dynamics properties. A comparison between previous works is realized via simulations and experiments to verify our approach. The results show fast and smooth convergence to the desired reference without overshoots.

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In this work, a position control for slider-crank mechanisms without Jacobian and joint measurements is presented. A Jacobian compensator that depends on the sign of the direction of rotation of the input link and the output link is proposed. A linear sensor is mounted at the slider to measure its position. Simulations and experiments are presented using two different Whitworth mechanisms to validate and compared the proposed approach with Jacobian-based controllers.

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