Fractional order PID controller for tracking control of SCARA robot

E-commerce packaging has unique needs, and new robot technology is meeting those needs. These needs include handling mixed pallet loads, workforce problems, and a range of secondary packaging types. This chapter presents the trajectory tracking control of an industrial SCARA robot in a realistic simulated environment with the help of fractional order PID (FOPID) and PID controller. FOPID controller has two extra degrees of freedom, thereby providing added flexibility to the design over the PID scheme. The optimum parameters of these controllers are obtained using the genetic algorithm (GA) by minimizing a weighted sum of absolute errors as an objective. Further, a comparative study of the controllers is performed for set-point tracking and model parameter uncertainty based on settling time, rise time, overshoot, and integral absolute error (IAE). The results have proved that FOPID outperforms its integer-order counterpart under a variety of operating conditions.