Control of vibration inflexible robot manipulators is considered in this chapter. A constrained planar single-link flexible manipulator is considered. Open-loop control strategies based on filtered and Gaussian-shaped command inputs and closed-loop control techniques based on partitioning of the rigid and flexible motion dynamics of the system are developed. These incorporate lowpass and bandstop filtered inputs, Gaussian-shaped inputs, switching surface and adaptive variable structure control, adaptive joint-based collocated and adaptive hybrid collocated and noncollocated control. The control strategies thus developed are tested within simulations and using a laboratory-scale flexible manipulator test rig.

12.1 Introduction

The demand for the employment of robots in various applications has increased in line with the increasing demand for system automation. Conventional rigid-link robots have been successfully used in industrial automation applications, and many control algorithms have been developed to control rigid-link robotic manipulators. However, there are significant limitations associated with rigid-link robots. The dominant factor that contributes largely to performance limitations of a robot is the limited capability of its control system especially in applications requiring high speed and/or large payloads. To obtain high accuracy in the end point position control, the weight to payload ratio must be very high or the operation speed must be very low to prevent link oscillation. A large amount of energy is needed to operate these bulky robots. This drawback greatly limits the applications of rigid robots in the field where high speed, high...