A Wire-Driven Soft Manipulator Based on Flexible Curved Beam Joints

A Parallel Fuzzy Controller for a Manipulator with Flexible Joints

This paper describes a parallel controller that was developed at the Center for Intelligent Systems at Vanderbilt University to control a manipulator with exible joints. The joints are actuated with muscle-like actuators called rubbertuators which exhibit nonlinear behavior. The paper presents the diierent control techniques that were used to control the manipulator. These techniques are PID, f...

Stabilization of a Flexible Manipulator Model with Passive Joints

To describe the dynamic behavior of a fire rescue turntable ladder the flexibility of the ladder set has to be analyzed. It turned out, that it can be modelled as a flexible manipulator consisting of an arbitrary number of links governed by the Euler-Bernoulli beam equation. The first link is fixed at one end and is driven by a control torque. The last link carries a payload. A peculiarity of t...

Nonlinear Analysis of a Flexible Beam Actuated by a Couple of Active SMA Wire Actuators

There are two different ways of using SMA wires as actuators for shape control of flexible structures; which can be either embedded within the composite laminate or externally attached to the structure. Since the actuator can be placed at different offset distances from the beam, external actuators produce more bending moment and, consequently, considerable shape changes with the same magnitude...

Singular perturbation based neuro-Hinfty control scheme for a manipulator with flexible links and joints

A novel composite control scheme for a manipulator with flexible links and joints is presented that uses the singular perturbation technique (SPT) to divide the manipulator dynamics into reduced order slow and fast subsystems. A neural network controller is then applied for the slow subsystem and a state-feedback H∞ controller for the fast subsystem. Results are presented that demonstrate impro...

Shape reconstruction for wire-driven flexible robots based on Bézier curve and electromagnetic positioning