An Attempt to Energy-Saving Driving for a Flexible Manipulator by Utilizing MFC

Abstract

This study deals with the positioning control problem of a one-link flexible manipulator consisting of two actuators which are a servomotor and a piezoelectric film, and then proposes a new feed-forward control method to suppress simultaneously the driving energy and residual vibration. Simulation and experiments were performed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. From this verification, it was confirmed that simultaneous optimization of the trajectory of servomotor and the input voltage of the piezoelectric film saves more energy than the only optimization of the trajectory. Therefore, we were able to establish an energy-saving feedforward control method by driving two actuators.