Hybrid position/force control of flexible manipulators

In this paper, we discuss the force control of flexible manipulators. Since the force control of flexible manipulators with planar one or two links using the distributed-parameter modeling has been the subject of a considerable number of publications until now, real time computations of the force control schemes are possible. But, application of those control schemes to multi-link spatial manipulators is fairly complicated. In this paper, we apply a concise hybrid position/force control scheme for a flexible manipulators. We use a lumped-parameter modeling for the flexible manipulators. The Hamilton's principle is applied to derive the equations of motion for the system and then, state-space model is obtained by the Lagrange's method. Finally, comparison of simulation results with experimental results is given to show the performance of our method.