Model order reduction for impact-contact dynamics simulations of flexible manipulators

Abstract

SUMMARY Dynamic simulation of a flexible manipulator performing physical contact (including low-speed impact) tasks with stiff environment is very time consuming because very small integration step sizes have to be used for numerical stability. Existing model order reduction techniques cannot be readily applied due to the nonlinear nature of the contact dynamics. In this paper, a method is introduced to deal with this problem. The method first linearizes the contact force model on the right-hand side of the dynamics equations periodically. It then identifies the linear “stiffness” and “damping” terms from the linearized contact force model and combines them with the existing structural stiffness and damping matrices of the associated multibody system on the left-hand side of the equations. After such a process, the traditional modal analysis and reduction techniques for linear dynamic systems can be applied to reduce the order of the resulting dynamic system. Two numerical examples of flexible manipulators performing a contact task are presented to demonstrate the significant gain in computational efficiency and the improved output results.