Control of Flexible Manipulator Systems

This paper presents an investigation into the development of open-loop and closed-loop control strategies for flexible manipulator systems. Shaped torque inputs, including gaussian shaped and lowpass ( Butterworth and elliptic) filtered input torque functions, are developed and used in an open-loop configuration and their performance studied in comparison to a bang-bang input torque through experimentation in a single-link flexible manipulator system. Closed loop-control strategies using both collated (hub angle and hub velocity) and non-collated (end-point acceleration) feedback are then proposed. A collocated proportional derivative (PD)control is first developed and its performance studied through experimentation. The collocated control is then extended to incorporate, additionally, non-collocated feedback through a proportional-integral-derivative (PID) configuration. The performance of the hybrid collocated control strategy thus developed is studied through experimentation. Experimental results verifying the performance of the developed control strategies are presented and discussed.