Positioning Control of a Flexible manipulator with MFC

Abstract

In this paper, we specifically examine a point-to-point (PTP) motion task of a flexible manipulator with macro fiber composite (MFC) and present a feedforward control technique for suppressing the residual vibration. We use a MFC attached to one side of the flexible manipulator that has one revolute joint as an actuator. In the control technique, we attempt to express the joint angle by the combination of cycloidal and polynomial functions. On the other hand, the input voltage profile of the MFC is expressed by Gaussian functions. The trajectory of the joint angle and the input voltage profile are dependent upon the coefficients of the polynomial function and the Gaussian functions, respectively. To cancel the residual vibrations, the trajectory and the input voltage profile are optimized simultaneously by tuning the coefficients using the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. We perform experiments to verify the validity of the vibration control method based on an off-line simulation. Results obtained from simulations and experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for suppressing the vibration.