Closed-form control oriented model of highly flexible manipulators

This paper first presents a highly flexible 3D manipulator with links of arbitrary shape, then develops a closed-form dynamic model that best describes it. The model is based on a Newton-Euler formulation and the substructuring method is used to account for large deformations. The formulation of the motion equations starts from a data set which can be either analytically or numerically computed by finite elements(FE) codes. Simulation has been used to validate the model and compare the results with those of two different multibody software and one experimental, which was obtained from the Multi-Elastic-Link Robot Identification Dataset (MERIt), developed by the TU Dortmund. Then, thanks to the approach here adopted, an integral manifold model is derived, suitable for advanced control system design.