Acceleration feedback for control of a flexible manipulator arm

Abstract

Abstract Many studies to date have dealt with control and modeling strategies for endpoint positioning of flexible manipulator arm systems, and some actual experiments have been documented in verification of developed methods. This article describes laboratory results for a single‐link flexible manipulator arm in which three separate control strategies are compared and contrasted. Namely, the control schemes compared are: compensation using classical root locus techniques with endpoint position feedback, a full state feedback, observer‐based design, and compensation using endpoint acceleration feedback. The last technique, designs using accelerometer feedback, has received very little attention to date, and results here indicate great promise for use in flexible manipulator control.