A Computationally Efficient Hysteresis Model for Magneto-Rheological Clutches and Its Comparison with Other Models

The collaborative robot market has experienced rapid growth, leading to advancements in compliant actuation and torque control. Magneto-rheological (MR) clutches offer a hardware-level solution for achieving both compliance and torque control through adjustable coupling between the input and output of the MR clutch. However, the presence of frequency-dependent magnetic hysteresis makes controlling the output torque challenging. In this paper, we present a comparative study of six widely used hysteresis models and propose a computationally efficient algebraic model to address the issue of hysteresis modeling and control of the output torque of rotary MR clutches. We compare the estimated torques with experimental measurements from a prototype MR clutch, to evaluate the computational complexity and accuracy of the model. Our proposed algebraic hysteresis model demonstrates superior accuracy and approximately two times less computational complexity than the Bouc–Wen model, and approximately twenty times less memory requirement than neural network-based models. We show that our proposed model has excellent potential for embedded indirect torque control schemes in systems with hysteresis, such as MR clutches and isolators.