In this paper, a discrete model is adopted, as proposed by Hencky for elastica
based on rigid bars and lumped rotational springs, to design the control of
a lightweight planar manipulator with multiple highly flexible links. This
model is particularly suited to deal with nonlinear equations of motion as
those associated with multilink robot arms, because it does not include any
simplification due to linearization, as in the assumed modes method. The aim of
the control is to track a trajectory of the end effector of the robot arm,
without the onset of vibrations. To this end, an energy-based method is
proposed. Numerical simulations show the effectiveness of the presented
approach.
Keywords
nonlinear elastica, discrete modeling, flexible robot arms,
energy-based control