A composite adaptive control with flexible quantity feedback for flexible-link manipulators

This article presents a mixture of joint subsystem-based adaptive control and simple flexible quantity feedback for flexible-link manipulators. The complex full flexible-arm system is composed of two severely coupling subsystems called the joint subsystem and flexible subsystem. Linear parametrization is first used to design an adaptive law for identifying the unknown parameters of a flexible manipulator based only on the joint subsystem. Joint-angle trajectory tracking can thus be achieved using the derived stable nonlinear adaptive control with the estimates of unknown parameters. To stabilize the flexible subsystem, we can simply add the feedback of transversal acceleration or deflection at the end point and/or along the flexible beam. The suggested approach is much simpler than those based on the full dynamics model of a flexible arm in required computations. Computer simulations on a single-link and a two-link flexible arm are tested to illustrate the validity of the strategy for both trajectory tracking and active damping. (C) 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.