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.