Control of two-link flexible manipulator using disturbance observer with reaction torque feedback

In this paper, we propose a simple and easily implementable controller for a planar type two-link flexible manipulator. Due to the neat property of disturbance observer, each flexible link can be considered as just two lumped masses with spring between them, which is called two-mass resonant model within selected frequency range. For such system, we design a controller which is simple to implement and robust for uncertainty using the feedforward disturbance cancellation through disturbance observer. The performance of the proposed method is verified by simulation and experiments.