Dynamic Simulation of Flexible Manipulator Systems with Structural Damping

This paper presents the development of a simulation environment characterising the dynamic behaviour of a flexible manipulator system incorporating hub inertia, payload and structural damping. A constrained planar single-link flexible manipulator is considered. A fourth-order partial differential equation model of the system, obtained through the utilisation of Lagrange equation and modal expansion method, including a mode frequency dependent damping term, is considered. A finite-dimensional discrete simulation of the flexible manipulator system is developed using a finite-difference discretisation of the dynamic equation of motion of the manipulator. The algorithm thus developed is implemented on a digital processor amd simulation results verifying the performance of the algorithm in characterising the dynamic behaviour of the manipulator under various loading conditions are presented and discussed.