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arXiv · 2603.29882

Passive iFIR filters for data-driven velocity control in robotics

Yi Zhang·Zixing Wang·Fulvio Forni
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Abstract

We present a passive, data-driven velocity control method for nonlinear robotic manipulators that achieves better tracking performance than optimized PID with comparable design complexity. Using only three minutes of probing data, a VRFT-based design identifies passive iFIR controllers that (i) preserve closed-loop stability via passivity constraints and (ii) outperform a VRFT-tuned PID baseline on the Franka Research 3 robot in both joint-space and Cartesian-space velocity control, achieving up to a 74.5% reduction in tracking error for the Cartesian velocity tracking experiment with the most demanding reference model. When the robot end-effector dynamics change, the controller can be re-learned from new data, regaining nominal performance. This study bridges learning-based control and stability-guaranteed design: passive iFIR learns from data while retaining passivity-based stability guarantees, unlike many learning-based approaches.

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Yi Zhang, Zixing Wang, Fulvio Forni. 2026-03-31. Passive iFIR filters for data-driven velocity control in robotics. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.29882

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