Experimental test-bed for a single link flexible manipulator

The advantage that lightweight flexible manipulators present over rigid robots have been recognized in several previously published works. During the past few years several researchers have investigated the modelling and control aspects of this complex structure but a review of the work already done shows very few facilities available for the actual implementation and verification of the theories presented. Because of this the authors have developed a laboratory facility at Colorado State University to investigate flexible manipulators. This work presents the description of the manipulator, the computer resources and data acquisition board. A detailed presentation of the collocated sensors available is also given. Non-collocated control of flexible manipulators is a very difficult task. For this purpose a wide field non-collocated sensor was developed and presented in detail. With respect to the parameter identification issue, much has been presented, however it is very difficult to do an extensive comparison under different load conditions without using expensive spectrum analyzers. At CSU an extensive software package and interface have been developed to obtain the frequency response of the arm when excited by differents patterns. This tool proves to be very useful and reliable in obtainning the actual frequency response of the arm to compare with the responses obtained by on-line algorithms. The hardware and software available at this laboratory is very important for future development at CSU in the area of control of flexible manipulators.