• Earthquakes and Structures
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• 제11권6호
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• pp.943-966
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• 2016

Recently, magnetorheological elastomer (MRE) material and its devices have been developed and attracted a good deal of attention for their potentials in vibration control. Among them, a highly adaptive base isolator based on MRE was designed, fabricated and tested for real-time adaptive control of base isolated structures against a suite of earthquakes. To perfectly take advantage of this new device, an accurate and robust model should be built to characterize its nonlinearity and hysteresis for its application in structural control. This paper first proposes a novel hysteresis model, in which a nonlinear hyperbolic sine function spring is used to portray the strain stiffening phenomenon and a Voigt component is incorporated in parallel to describe the solid-material behaviours. Then the fruit fly optimization algorithm (FFOA) is employed for model parameter identification using testing data of shear force, displacement and velocity obtained from different loading conditions. The relationships between model parameters and applied current are also explored to obtain a current-dependent generalized model for the control application. Based on the proposed model of MRE base isolator, a second-order sliding mode controller is designed and applied to the device to provide a real-time feedback control of smart structures. The performance of the proposed technique is evaluated in simulation through utilizing a three-storey benchmark building model under four benchmark earthquake excitations. The results verify the effectiveness of the proposed current-dependent model and corresponding controller for semi-active control of MRE base isolator incorporated smart structures.

• International Journal of Control, Automation, and Systems
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• 제6권5호
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• pp.677-688
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• 2008

In this paper, the general problem of impedance control for a robotic manipulator with a moving flexible base is addressed. Impedance control imposes a relation between force and displacement at the contact point with the environment. The concept of impedance control of flexible base mobile manipulator is rather new and is being considered for first time using singular perturbation and new sliding mode control methods by authors. Initially slow and fast dynamics of robot are decoupled using singular perturbation method. Slow dynamics represents the dynamics of the manipulator with rigid base. Fast dynamics is the equivalent effect of the flexibility in the base. Then, using sliding mode control method, an impedance control law is derived for the slow dynamics. The asymptotic stability of the overall system is guaranteed using a combined control law comprising the impedance control law and a feedback control law for the fast dynamics. As first time, base flexibility was analyzed accurately in this paper for flexible base moving manipulator (FBMM). General dynamic decoupling, whole system stability guarantee and new composed robust control method were proposed. This proposed Sliding Mode Impedance Control Method (SMIC) was simulated for two FBMM models. First model is a simple FBMM composed of a 2 DOFs planar manipulator and a single DOF moving base with flexibility in between. Second FBMM model is a complete advanced 10 DOF FBMM composed of a 4 DOF manipulator and a 6 DOF moving base with flexibility. This controller provides desired position/force control accurately with satisfactory damped vibrations especially at the point of contact. This is the first time that SMIC was addressed for FBMM.