Modeling and Control of Single-Link Flexible Arms with Lumped Masses

This paper deals with the modeling and control of a special class of single-link flexible arms. These arms consist of flexible massless structures having some masses concentrated at certain points of the beam. In this paper, the dynamic model of such flexible arms is dewloped and some of the control properties are deduced. A robust control scheme to remove the effects of friction in the joins is proposed. The control scheme consists of two nested feedback loops, an inner loop to control the position of the motor and an outer loop to control the tip position. The inner loop is described in other publications. A simple fedforward-feedback controller is designed for the outer loop to driw the beam accurately along a desired trajectoty. Effects of the changes in the tip’s mass are studied. This modeling and control method is then generalized to the distributed-mass flexible beam case. Finally, experimentaf results are presented.