An analytical and experimental investigation of flexible manipulator performance

A critical modeling of a flexible manipulator will involve a thorough understanding of the issues specific to flexible manipulator performance and an experimental investigation of a physical system. A comprehensive dynamic model of a flexible manipulator has been presented in this paper together with a preliminary experimental investigation that examines the performance of this comprehensive model. The analytical model recognizes in particular, the coupling characteristics of the deformations in a flexible manipulator configuration and realizes an efficient and dedicated finite element scheme to model general spatial manipulator configurations with revolute and prismatic pairs. The experimental results indicate a favorable level of performance for the application of the special finite element for a practical manipulator.