Active Control of Space Flexible-Joint/Flexible-Link Manipulator

In this paper, active control of space manipulator with flexible-link and flexible-joint was investigated based on the singular perturbation method. Owing to the combined effects of the link and joint flexibilities, the dynamics model of this type of manipulator became more complex and led to a series of unsolved control system. To simplify the design of control system, singular perturbation method was exploited to obtain the two-time-scale simpler subsystem and composite control methods were designed to realize precise trajectory tracking and vibration suppression simultaneously of one-link and one-joint flexible manipulator with payload. In the slow subsystem, a fuzzy sliding-mode controller was designed to decrease the influences of external disturbance and parameters uncertainties, the system stability and asymptotic trajectory tracking performance were guaranteed by Lyapunov function; while a linear-quadratic controller was designed to suppress the vibration in the fast subsystem. The performances of proposed controller were demonstrated by the simulation results.