A Study for CP Control of Two-Link Flexible Manipulator Using Subspace Control(<Special Issue>D & D 2008)

CP control of a two-link planar flexible manipulator is studied. The method to derive the optimal trajectory of the state variables and the computed torque wherein the tip position of the manipulator follows an arbitrary continuous path accurately is proposed. The exact trajectory of the state variables for an arbitrary tip position path can not be obtained because a flexible manipulator is a redundant and underactuated system. The dimension reduction feature of subspace control is used. In subspace control, the state space is separated into the control subspace and the complementary subspace. The proposed method consists of the calculation of the approximate trajectory of the state variables using the control subspace and the correction of the trajectory using the complementary subspace. Also, the availability of this method is confirmed by numerical simulation. The tip position follows desired trajectory accurately in both cases of the linear and circular desired trajectory.