Joints Position Estimation of a Redundant Scara Robot by Means of the Unscented Kalman Filter and Inertial Sensors

A method is presented for estimating the position of rotational and prismatic joints of a novel SCARA-type fault-tolerant redundant manipulator using inertial sensors (accelerometers and gyroscopes). The estimation is based on the integration of the different sensors by means of the modified AUKF algorithm. The results of the evaluation of this integration scheme are compared with the CMRGD and DCMR methods, which are used for the estimation of the positions of rotational joints based on inertial sensors, showing a clear advantage of the proposed integration method over existing methods for estimating the joint angles, in addition to allowing the calculation of the position of prismatic joints. © 2015 Chinese Automatic Control Society and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd.