Vibration suppression of a flexible shaft system using indirect adaptive control

This paper presents an adaptive controller for a flexible shaft system exhibiting hard nonlinearities due to the friction in both motor and load. Unlike the most of the previous research which rely on linear model, the methodology presented in this paper considers the nonlinear model for the flexible shaft. Moreover, the proposed control scheme is easy to implement as opposed to previous research on the field. To damp the vibration of the flexible shaft, a Self-Tuning-Regulator (STR) based on parameter estimation is employed. A Kalman filter is used to estimate system parameters in the presence of measurement as well as the process noise. Simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.