A Reproducible and Physically Feasible Dynamic Parameter Identification Framework for a Low-Cost Robot Arm
Provides a practical, reproducible pipeline for obtaining physically feasible dynamic models on low-cost robot platforms, addressing a key bottleneck in robot control and simulation.
The paper develops a dynamic parameter identification framework for a low-cost robot arm (CRANE-X7), reducing the rigid-body model from 65 to 39 base parameters and combining OLS, SDP projection, and CLIE refinement to ensure physical feasibility. The final model achieves high predictive accuracy on held-out validation motions.
This paper presents a reproducible and physically feasible dynamic parameter identification framework for CRANE-X7, a low-cost robot arm driven by modular smart actuators. To improve practical identifiability, products of inertia are removed according to approximate link symmetry, reducing the rigid-body model from 65 to 39 base parameters. Identification motions are hand-designed from structured single-joint and adjacent-joint primitives under practical joint-range limits. The proposed pipeline combines preprocessing, inverse-dynamics-regressor-based ordinary least squares (OLS), conditional semidefinite-programming (SDP) projection for feasibility recovery, and closed-loop input error (CLIE) refinement. Candidate solutions from 40 structured trajectories are analyzed in a common PCA space to select a statistically central representative model. Because statistical centrality alone does not ensure physical acceptability, the selected model is finally screened by an all-pose positive-definiteness audit of the inertia matrix and, when necessary, corrected by a localized post-CLIE SDP rescue step. Experiments show that the parameter cloud becomes progressively more concentrated from OLS to SDP and CLIE, while the final accepted model preserves high predictive accuracy on held-out validation motions. These results demonstrate a practical route to statistically coherent and physically feasible dynamic models for low-cost robot platforms.