Comparison between real time PID and 2-DOF PID controller for 6-DOF robot arm

Robotics and its applications have become increasingly important in the field of manufacturing industry. Robot manipulators are effectively used for this purpose. Control of manipulators is very important, however, highly nonlinear and multi-input multi-output (MIMO) complex structure of manipulators make the control difficult. This paper presents two-degree of freedom PID controller scheme for a six-degree of freedom rigid robotic manipulator. Traditional PID controllers are widely used due to their simple control structure and ease of implementation in industry. However load disturbances and parametric variation affect the robustness of the controller. The performance of proposed two-degree of freedom PID controller is compared with the traditional PID controllers. Matlab-Simulink program is used for real-time implementation of the proposed method. Experimental results show that two-degree of freedom PID control is better than the traditional PID for manipulator control in real time.