Experimental evaluation of passivity-based control of manipulator-stage system on flexible beam

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the modeling and control problem of the stage-manipulator system on the vertical flexible beam and provide experiment results of the proposed passivity-based control framework which separately achieves two control objectives, i.e. the end-effector (EF) tracking and vibration suppression. For this, we first utilize the passive decomposition to split the dynamics into: 1) the stage and beam dynamics; and 2) its orthogonal complement, which converges to the robotic manipulator dynamics as the vibration is subdued. We design an LQR control to stabilize the beam vibration only by using the stage motion and tracking control for the orthogonal complement dynamics in such a way that it can attain the manipulator EF tracking asymptotically as the vibration is suppressed. Experiments are also performed for the EF tracking while the vibration is suppressed internally via the stage motion.