Investigation of feasible controller for position control of flexible joint manipulator using multiple control techniques

With the advancement in technology, industries are moving from automation to robotics in the era of robotization. Different control techniques are being used in a different sector of production to control the whole machinery with special attention towards control the position and vibrations. In this research article, the feasible controller has been investigated for position control of flexible joint manipulator. For this, an effective version of a single linked flexible joint robotic manipulator has been used as a platform to control the position of manipulator using different control approaches. Euler’s–Lagrange equations have been used to obtain the effective version of the system and the position control has been performed by proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller, pole –placement and linear quadratic regulator (LQR) methods. The main target of this research work is to maintain the rotational angle of the joint at an appropriate position and to remove the fluctuations at a specific robotic tool which is known as end effectors. The gains of PID controller have been delineated with the help of genetic algorithm and tuned for obtaining the most suitable gains to control the position of flexible joint manipulator and vibrations. As the settling time of the system was high so genetic algorithm has been used to optimize it. The Matlab®/simulation results depict that genetic algorithm tuned PID controller performed better correlated to both pole placement and LQR method of control.