Simultaneous precision positioning and vibration suppression of reciprocating flexible manipulators

Simultaneous precision positioning and vibration suppression of a reciprocating flexible manipulator is investigated in this paper. The flexible manipulator is driven by a multifunctional active strut with fuzzy logic controllers. The multifunctional active strut is a combination of a motor assembly and a piezoelectric stack actuator to simultaneously provide precision positioning and wide frequency bandwidth vibration suppression capabilities. First, the multifunctional active strut and the flexible manipulator are introduced, and their dynamic models are derived. A control strategy is then proposed, which includes a position controller and a vibration controller to achieve simultaneous precision positioning and vibration suppression of the flexible manipulator. Next, fuzzy logic control approach is presented to design a fuzzy logic position controller and a fuzzy logic vibration controller. Finally, experiments are conducted for the fuzzy logic controllers and the experimental results are compared with those from a PID control scheme consisting of a PID position controller and a PID vibration control. The comparison indicates that the fuzzy logic controller can easily handle the non-linearity in the strut and provide higher position accuracy and better vibration reduction with less control power consumption.