Simultaneous plant-controller design optimization of a two-link planar manipulator

This paper presents a methodology based on numerical optimization techniques for simultaneously optimizing design parameters of a two-link planar rigid manipulator and a nonlinear gain PD controller designed for performing multiple tasks. The formulation of simultaneous plant-controller design optimization problem and the description of solution techniques based on a heuristic evolutionary algorithm for solving this optimization problem are presented. The gravity balanced two-link planar manipulator design is described and a class of nonlinear gain PD controllers is introduced for the set-point control of manipulator with counter-weights and different payloads. The results of the simultaneous design optimization involving a nonlinear PD controller and the two-link manipulator are given.