Trajectory Generation and Oscillation Damping Control for a Flexible Link Robot

A trajectory generation with two different operating modes was developed for a new generation of fire turntable ladders as a specific type of flexible link manipulators. The trajectory generation module provides the time indexed reference functions of the joint velocities, accelerations and jerks for an underlying tracking control with abilities to damp the oscillations of the cage. In order to shorten the time for rescue operations in the automated mode a play-back drive of a previously teached-in path was realized. The axes velocities can be significantly increased depending on an adjustable value of the maximum allowed deviation between the play-back and teached-in path.