抄録
This paper discusses manual motion control (MMC) problems. MMC problems are seen in conveyance of a large amount of products in factories and stores. One of the most successful examples of MMC is "power assist". The power-assisted systems have been introduced to reduce workers' loads in industrial production. In near future, higher efficiency of works by power-assisted systems will be required. One of the methods to improve the efficiency is connection and cooperation of plural systems. Then, this paper proposes a control system realizing smooth connection and cooperation of plural mechanical systems without any stops on the basis of the principle of the power assist. Power-assisted carts are used as a controlled object example. Moreover, tumbles of conveyed objects are also considered. In order to realize smooth connection without any stops, stopping cart should accelerate to the same velocity as running cart. For this purpose, this paper attempts to apply the final-state control (FSC) to the control problem. However, the velocity of the running cart is time-varying and FSC cannot deal with such a time-varying reference. Accordingly, an improvement of FSC, updating final-state control (UFSC), is anew introduced. UFSC updates the ideal final states and computes the FSC input vector at each control sample. By using UFSC, the stopping cart can accelerate to the time-varying velocity of the running cart. Here, UFSC input vector includes the computation of inverse matrices and computing it at each sample requires large loads for computers. In addition, by updating, most of factors in the computed UFSC input vector except for the first row will not be applied. So, this paper extracts the first row's computation of UFSC input vector and reduces the computational load. The effectiveness of the proposed control system is verified by experiments and simulations using actual two power-assisted carts.
