Residual vibration suppression for robot manipulator attached to a flexible link by using soft computing techniques

As described in this paper, we specifically examine a point-to-point motion task of a rigid robot manipulator attached to a flexible link and present an optimal trajectory planning technique for suppressing residual vibrations of the flexible link. Soft computing methods are used in the trajectory planning method, in which radial basis function networks and a particle swarm optimization algorithm are adopted. Suppression of residual vibration can be accomplished by rotating the joint along the generated trajectory. The proposed control scheme is an open-loop control that does not require sensors to measure unwanted vibrations. Results obtained from simulations and experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed trajectory planning method for suppressing residual vibration.