Position and Vibration Control of a Flexible Manipulator Using $\mu$-Synthesis

Abstract

When a robot is to have contact with its enviornment, such as a medi-care robot, it would be advantageous for the robot to have a high compliance. For this reason, a robot having not only a flexible link but also an actuator with compliance, is desirable. This paper is concerned with the position and vibration control of 1 degree of freedom flexible robot using a pneumatic artificial muscle actuator. The dynamics of the manipulator assumed to be and Euler-Bernoulli beam are derived on the basis of the linear mathematical modle. Although this pneumatic artifical muscle actuator has many merits for the compliance robot, it is difficult to make an effective control scheme of this system because of ths nonlinearity and uncertainty on the dynamics of the actuator. By designing a controller using .mu.-synthesis, robust performance against measurement noise, various modeling uncertainties on the dynamics of the servo valve, actuator and mainpulator, is achieved. The effectiveness of the proposed control method is illustrated through simulations and experiments.