Passivity-based control of single-link flexible manipulators using a linear strain feedback

• A new methodology for the design of passivity-based control is presented.
• The obtained controllers remove tip vibration of single-link flexible manipulators.
• Minimum knowledge of system dynamics is needed to yield robust controllers.
• The controllers are robust to large payload uncertainties and joint frictions.
• Simulation and experimental results illustrate the contributions of this work.

This work presents a new methodology for the design of a passivity-based control of single-link flexible manipulators. The control objective is the precise positioning of the link tip under large payload changes, which is achieved by combining a precise joint positioning with a link vibration damping. The main ingredients of the proposed methodology are as follows: a) a linear strain feedback is used to decouple the joint and link dynamics, b) the precise joint positioning is thus simplified to a motor controller, which is designed to be robust to joint frictions, and c) the residual tip vibrations are damped by a control designed using a passivity property between the strain measured at the base of the link and the joint velocity. Simulations and experimental results illustrated the performance of the proposed methodology.