Adaptive robust control for flexible manipulators

Because the control DOF (Degree of Freedom) is much less than the motion DOF when a flexible manipulator is commanded to track a desired trajectory, many control strategies that succeed in conventional rigid-robot control cannot be directly applied to solve the flexible robot control problem. In this work, an adaptive variable structure scheme has been proposed to solve such a problem. The full nonlinear dynamics of the whole system are all taken into account for the control design. To alleviate the chattering phenomenon commonly seen in variable structure type of control, a saturation type adaptive scheme has also been proposed. For verification of the effectiveness of the proposed controller, a two-link flexible manipulator is built up and the promise of the controller is experimentally demonstrated.