ABSTRACT
This chapter presents vibration control of a flexible manipulator that performs three-dimensional motion. At present, industrial robots are required to increase the speed of operation in order to reduce the weight of the robot and improve the work efficiency for the purpose of energy saving and cost reduction. In addition, if the operation speed is increased, vibration will occur in the arm even if the robot is highly rigid. For these reasons, the development of a control method that takes into account the flexibility of the manipulator is an important issue. However, the study of vibration suppression in three-dimensional motion is also difficult to model and control. First, we applied and verified a new inverse system design which constructed a stable inverse system using inner and outer decomposition for the unstable zero of the flexible manipulators and then design a strain feedback controller. After that, the vibration suppression performance of the two-degree-of-freedom controller was confirmed in experiment. From the results, it was confirmed that the proposed control system is effective for vibration control of the flexible manipulator that moves in three dimensions.
