Independent Modal Space Control based Trajectory Control for an Articulated Planar Manipulator with Flexible Links

In this paper, trajectory control of a planar articulated flexible manipulator having two links is achieved using the technique of independent modal space control. For this, the joint torques of the manipulator are expressed as functions of joint errors and joint error derivatives. The governing equations belong to the class of second-order differential equations whose coefficients vary with time. Application of independent modal space control theory on these equations yield a method for finding the control gains for a proportional-derivative controller. The controller thus developed is described as coupled-error dynamics controller. Simulation results show that the proposed controller gives output close to that of a computed-torque controller.