A SINGULAR PERTURBATION APPROACH TO CONTROL OF LIGHTWEIGHT FLEXIBLE MANIPULATORS

The control lightweight flexible manipulators is the focus of this work. The flexible manipulator dynamics is derived on the basis of a Lagrangian-assumed modes method. The full-order flexible dynamic system does not allow the determination of a nonlinear feedback control as for rigid manipulators, since there are not as many control inputs as output variables. This drawback is ovecome by a model order reduction, based on a singular perturbation strategy, where the fast state variables are the elastic forces and their time derivatives.