Control and Joint Inertia Analysis of Flexible Manipulator based on Singular Perturbation Theory

Aiming at the flexible manipulator suppress the beam vibration while track a desired trajectory, the paper decouples the system of flexible-link manipulator into rigid motion (slow subsystem) and flexible vibration (fast subsystem) two different time scale subsystems based on singular perturbation theory and presents a simple composite control scheme. For the slow subsystem, a PD controller is employed to track the desired trajectory, while optimal controller is used to stabilize the fast subsystem to suppress the vibration. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy. Furthermore, the effect of the joint inertia on the performance of flexible manipulator is discussed.