Control of flexible manipulators via singular perturbations and distributed vibration damping (Q1911407)

The paper presents a composite control strategy for slewing point-to-point motion of a planar two-link flexible manipulator. It combines a torque control law at the manipulator hubs, based on an integral manifold approach, with a vibration suppressing control obtained through a polymer film layer attached along the links and used as a spatially distributed actuator. The torque controller design follows from a standard two-time scale decomposition of the system dynamics and achieves an approximate feedback linearization via \(O(\varepsilon)\) corrective action to stabilize the slow manifold subsystem. The distributed controller is used to stabilize the infinite-dimensional fast dynamics. A considerable effort is devoted to the complete modeling of the infinite-dimensional system and to the derivation of a finite-dimensional approximation based on properly assumed modes. Extensive comparative simulations are reported, using one dominant flexural mode for each link. It is shown that inclusion of distributed control somewhat improves the behavior of the flexible arm, with respect to PD joint control and approximate linearizing control alone.