Prediction Tools for Active Damping and Motion Planning of Flexible Manipulators

Abstract

Three novel predictive tools are developed for motion planning and active damping of long-reach flexible manipulator systems. One of these, the momentum coupling map, is an enhancement of the previously proposed coupling map concept, extended to general flexible-link or flexible-joint manipulator systems. It is a graphical tool and can be used to optimize the motion of the flexible manipulator to minimize the vibration excited during a point-to-point maneuver. The other two, the accelerative damping map and the modal inertia map, were motivated by the active damping problem of macro-micro manipulators. They are designed to predict the optimal micromanipulator configuration for damping vibrations in the supporting (macro-) arm. The performance of the maps is illustrated by using two example manipulator systems: a simple two-link robot and the experimental macro-micro manipulator constructed at the University of Victoria. For motion planning, the paths predicted with the maps are compared with those calculated by the global optimization procedure. For active damping, the maps are compared and evaluated against the experimental results for the macro-micro arm. It is demonstrated that the observed damping performance is in very good agreement with the predictions of the maps.