Control of parallel flexible five bar manipulator using QFT

Abstract

Light weight robotic manipulators have significant advantages over their heavy counterparts in terms of efficiency of energy consumption and speed. However, they also have an inherent problem of vibrations which significantly affect their performance. Control strategies need to be developed to control their vibrational behavior. Many different control strategies have already been developed and tested on the manipulators. However, not enough work has been done to test the Quantitative Feedback Theory, a frequency domain based robust control strategy. Though several nonlinear model/control based methods have been developed for control of single or serial flexible link manipulator, the domain of parallel flexible links manipulators is unexplored. QFT, being a robust control strategy, promises to exactly tackle these uncertainties in the manipulator. This project is aimed at analyzing the performance of a QFT based controller in controlling the vibrations in flexible multilink manipulator systems.