Detection and isolation of actuator faults and collisions for a flexible robot arm

This paper presents a unified approach to detection and isolation of both actuator faults and unexpected collisions for a two-link robot with a flexible forearm. The proposed approach is sensorless, i.e., no dedicated exteroceptive sensors are considered, and is based on the design of residuals to be used as monitoring filters. The method has been tested by extensive simulations on the Flexarm robot used as case study. The reported results show the efficacy in detecting and isolating faults in the actuators or collisions on the robot links.