Observer design for a flexible robot arm with a tip load

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the observer design for a flexible robot arm with a tip load. The robot arm is modeled as an Euler-Bernoulli beam. The beam is clamped to a motor at one end and attached to a force actuator at the other. Based on measurements at the boundaries, an exponentially stable observer is proposed. The existence, uniqueness and stability of solutions of the proposed observer are based on semigroup theory. Numerical simulation results are included to illustrate the performance of the proposed observer.