INVERSE DYNAMICS OF ARTICULATED FLEXIBLE STRUCTURES - SIMULTANEOUS TRAJECTORY TRACKING AND VIBRATION REDUCTION

This paper addresses the problem of inverse dynamics for articulated flexible structures with both lumped and distributed actuators. This problem arises, for example, in the combined vibration minimization and trajectory control of space robots and structures. For such flexible structures, closed loop passive joint based controllers have been shown to be effective in trajectory control by Paden et al. Crucial to the development of such closed loop controllers, which are robust to external perturbations, is the problem of dynamic inversion which yields the nominal state trajectories and the feedforward inputs. In this paper we propose a new inverse dynamics scheme for computing the nominal lumped and distributed feedforward inputs for tracking a prescribed trajectory.