Experimental evaluation of robust reduced-order hybrid position/force control on a two-link flexible manipulator

This paper compares the experimental evaluation of robust reduced-order hybrid position and force controllers to standard full-order and reduced-order linear-quadratic Gaussian (LQG) controllers. A robust reduced-order position controller and a reduced-order force controller are designed using the SANDY direct optimization program. Full-order LQG position and force controllers are designed and then reduced through balanced truncation. Experimental results show that the reduced-order controllers provide comparable performance to the full-order controllers. Thus, by use of direct-optimization, the benefits of smaller controllers (smaller memory requirements and faster sampling rates) can be achieved while accounting for varying plant conditions (robustness)