CONTROL OF FLEXIBLE STRUCTURES WITH THE CONFINEMENT OF VIBRATIONS

A novel control strategy for the simultaneous suppression and confinement of vibrations inflexible structures is proposed. The key idea is to alter the original modes by appropriate feedback forces to allow parts of a flexible structure to reach their steady states at fast rates. It has been demonstrated that the convergence of these parts to zero is improved at the expense of slowing down the settling of the remaining parts to their steady states. The proposed control strategy can be applied in the rapid removal of vibration energy in sensitive parts of a flexible structure for safety or performance reasons. Such parts include communication antennas in light space structures and payloads of flexible robot manipulators. In order to gain insight into the viability of the proposed control strategy, the latter is compared with a classical feedback control strategy under the same input bound constraint. It has been shown that the new control strategy brings the sensitive parts to rest with approximately 50 percent reduction in time.