A Comparison Study on Observer-based Force Control of Series Elastic Actuators

This paper presents a comparison study for the robust force control of series elastic actuators (SEAs). In most robotics systems, SEAs are used as an essential actuation method due to the benefits such as lower reflected inertia and safety. However, the robustness to the modeling uncertainties and external disturbances is still a study material for researchers. It is known that when model-based control methods are used with disturbance observers, high precision tracking results can be obtained. Therefore, in this study, model predictive control and model-based feedforward control methods are investigated in different scenarios and simulation results are provided for comparison.