Vibration Control for Slewing Flexible Structures

In this paper we develop several different controllers for slewing flexible structures with results evaluated on a flexible planar truss testbed. The objective of these control schemes is rapid large angle maneuvering (slewing) of the truss with effective suppression of residual vibrations, particularly at the endpoints. Results of three control schemes are presented, two linear schemes based on input shaping and one non-linear scheme. The second of the linear controllers is a novel approach to incorporate a discrete-time input shaper into the feedback loop. The nonlinear scheme consists of an implementation of sliding mode control.