Control of Intelligent Adaptive Structures. 2nd Report. Hardware Experiments of Optimal Trajectory Control.

Abstract

This paper is concerned with an experimental study on optimal trajectory control of a variable geometry truss, which is one of the intelligent truss structures composed of a truss-type mechanism. The intelligent structure considered here is assumed to have many sensors and actuators. Thus, the intelligent structure utilized as a manipulator arm has high redundancy. In the first report, two efficient methods were proposed for manipulation trajectory control under the relaxed conditions of optimality, and the validity of the proposed methods is demonstrated through numerical simulations. In this study, the proposed methods are applied to a hardware experiment. The experimental results confirm the validity of the proposed control methods. Also, it is shown that an optical sensor feedback is effective for the precise control of the position and orientation of the end tip of the trus along the trajectory, even when these controllers have some modeling errors.