Design and experimental evaluation of a single robust position/force controller for a single flexible link (SFL) manipulator in collision

This paper presents a design methodology for designing position/force controllers for a single flexible link (SFL) manipulator. The objective is to design a single controller that stabilizes the system during both constrained and unconstrained motion, avoiding problems that arise when using switching controllers. A coherent system identification based robust control design methodology is presented. As a robust controller, we consider the quantitative feedback theory (QFT) based design. The proposed method is very suitable since linear model of constrained SFL manipulator is a gross simplification and includes significant uncertainties that can be handled well in the QFT frame work.