Adaptive input shaping for maneuvering flexible structures (Q1433072)

In the last twenty years aero-space technology engineers have encountered problems which are entirely different to the ones encountered by structural engineers of the not so distant past. The dynamic behavior of flexible structures maneuvering at very high speed present control of vibration problems that were never considered in the old-fashioned techniques of optimizing the design in which basically linear mathematical models were describing the state of the system. This has been made more complex when very light exotic alloys, which never heard of Hooke's law, were replacing the earlier materials. The importance of light weight overrules most other aspects, and these new materials brought with them strange flexible behavior and unexpected modes of vibration. Adaptive techniques became widely accepted and learning procedures replaced the familiar feedback loops. Feed-forward methods combined with the feed-back loops showed promise. Nonlinearity and coupling of different modes of vibration caused the engineers to abandon the classical PDE approach to mathematical modelling, such as finding in which Sobolev or Besov space one must look for solutions, when one is not certain of reaction of a complex structure to a dynamic high-speed maneuver, and admits ignorance of a reasonable mathematical model. For this reason one may find only a few mathematical state equations. Input shaping replaces PDE analysis. The input shaping is a feed-forward technique in which the input is convoluted with a sequence of impulses called the shapers. Estimates of the modes and frequencies and of the internal damping are used to determine the amplitudes and frequencies of such shapers. The reviewer points out a study of internal damping by R. Bagley et al. which used differential equations of fractional order to obtain some very interesting results, which were reasonably confirmed by experiments. The classical types of computations are frequently replaced by Monte Carlo techniques. In design of the shaper the duration of a maneuver is of crucial importance. Trying to send more impulses lengthens the time of the maneuver. The so-called adapted impulse shaping (AIS) consists of taking shorter shaping, which is less robust, but can be easier tuned to the system's frequencies. Also the shorter shaping has the adverse effect of an increased sensitivity to the parameters' variation. The authors exhibit a model based on a single flexible mode, combined with a rigid body assumption. Their Adapted Impulse Shaper (AIS) is illustrating in this simple case how the AIS technique tunes the shaper between maneuvers.