Nonlinear control for Two-Link flexible manipulator

Recently the use of robot manipulators has been increasing in many applications such as medical applications, automobile, construction, manufacturing, military, space, etc. However, current rigid manipulators have high inertia and use actuators with large energy consumption. Moreover, rigid manipulators are slow and have low payload-to arm-mass ratios because link deformation is not allowed. The main advantages of flexible manipulators over rigid manipulators are light in weight, higher speed of operation, larger workspace, smaller actuator, lower energy consumption and lower cost. However, there is no adequate closed-form solutions exist for flexible manipulators. This is mainly because flexible dynamics are modeled with partial differential equations, which give rise to infinite dimensional dynamical systems that are, in general, not possible to represent exactly or efficiently on a computer which makes modeling a challenging task. In addition, if flexibility nature wasn\u27t considered, there will be calculation errors in the calculated torque requirement for the motors and in the calculated position of the end-effecter. As for the control task, it is considered as a complex task since flexible manipulators are non-minimum phase system, under-actuated system and Multi-Input/Multi-Output (MIMO) nonlinear system. This thesis focuses on the development of dynamic formulation model and three control techniques aiming to achieve accurate position control and improving dynamic stability for Two-Link Flexible Manipulators (TLFMs). LQR controller is designed based on the linearized model of the TLFM; however, it is applied on both linearized and nonlinear models. In addition to LQR, Backstepping and Sliding mode controllers are designed as nonlinear control approaches and applied on both the nonlinear model of the TLFM and the physical system. The three developed control techniques are tested through simulation based on the developed dynamic formulation model using MATLAB/SIMULINK. Stability and performance analysis were conducted and tuned to obtain the best results. Then, the performance and stability results obtained through simulation are compared. Finally, the developed control techniques were implemented and analyzed on the 2-DOF Serial Flexible Link Robot experimental system from Quanser and the results are illustrated and compared with that obtained through simulation

Optimal Control of Unknown Nonlinear System From Inputoutput Data

Optimal control designers usually require a plant model to design a controller. The problem is the controller\u27s performance heavily depends on the accuracy of the plant model. However, in many situations, it is very time-consuming to implement the system identification procedure and an accurate structure of a plant model is very difficult to obtain. On the other hand, neuro-fuzzy models with product inference engine, singleton fuzzifier, center average defuzzifier, and Gaussian membership functions can be easily trained by many well-established learning algorithms based on given input-output data pairs. Therefore, this kind of model is used in the current optimal controller design. Two approaches of designing optimal controllers of unknown nonlinear systems based on neuro-fuzzy models are presented in the thesis. The first approach first utilizes neuro-fuzzy models to approximate the unknown nonlinear systems, and then the feasible-direction algorithm is used to achieve the numerical solution of the Euler-Lagrange equations of the formulated optimal control problem. This algorithm uses the steepest descent to find the search direction and then apply a one-dimensional search routine to find the best step length. Finally several nonlinear optimal control problems are simulated and the results show that the performance of the proposed approach is quite similar to that of optimal control to the system represented by an explicit mathematical model. However, due to the limitation of the feasible-direction algorithm, this method cannot be applied to highly nonlinear and dimensional plants. Therefore, another approach that can overcome these drawbacks is proposed. This method utilizes Takagi-Sugeno (TS) fuzzy models to design the optimal controller. TS fuzzy models are first derived from the direct linearization of the neuro-fuzzy models, which is close to the local linearization of the nonlinear dynamic systems. The operating points are chosen so that the TS fuzzy model is a good approximation of the neuro-fuzzy model. Based on the TS fuzzy model, the optimal control is implemented for a nonlinear two-link flexible robot and a rigid asymmetric spacecraft, thus providing the possibility of implementing the well-established optimal control method on unknown nonlinear dynamic systems

Benchmarking Cerebellar Control

Cerebellar models have long been advocated as viable models for robot dynamics control. Building on an increasing insight in and knowledge of the biological cerebellum, many models have been greatly refined, of which some computational models have emerged with useful properties with respect to robot dynamics control. Looking at the application side, however, there is a totally different picture. Not only is there not one robot on the market which uses anything remotely connected with cerebellar control, but even in research labs most testbeds for cerebellar models are restricted to toy problems. Such applications hardly ever exceed the complexity of a 2 DoF simulated robot arm; a task which is hardly representative for the field of robotics, or relates to realistic applications. In order to bring the amalgamation of the two fields forwards, we advocate the use of a set of robotics benchmarks, on which existing and new computational cerebellar models can be comparatively tested. It is clear that the traditional approach to solve robotics dynamics loses ground with the advancing complexity of robotic structures; there is a desire for adaptive methods which can compete as traditional control methods do for traditional robots. In this paper we try to lay down the successes and problems in the fields of cerebellar modelling as well as robot dynamics control. By analyzing the common ground, a set of benchmarks is suggested which may serve as typical robot applications for cerebellar models

Comprehensive review on controller for leader-follower robotic system

985-1007This paper presents a comprehensive review of the leader-follower robotics system. The aim of this paper is to find and elaborate on the current trends in the swarm robotic system, leader-follower, and multi-agent system. Another part of this review will focus on finding the trend of controller utilized by previous researchers in the leader-follower system. The controller that is commonly applied by the researchers is mostly adaptive and non-linear controllers. The paper also explores the subject of study or system used during the research which normally employs multi-robot, multi-agent, space flying, reconfigurable system, multi-legs system or unmanned system. Another aspect of this paper concentrates on the topology employed by the researchers when they conducted simulation or experimental studies

Terminal sliding mode control strategy design for second-order nonlinear system

This study mainly focuses on the terminal sliding mode control (TSMC) strategy design, including an adaptive terminal sliding mode control (ATSMC) and an exact-estimator-based terminal sliding mode control (ETSMC) for second-order nonlinear dynamical systems. In the ATSMC system, an adaptive bound estimation for the lump uncertainty is proposed to ensure the system stability. On the other hand, an exact estimator is designed for exact estimating system uncertainties to solve the trouble of chattering phenomena caused by a sign function in ATSMC law in despite of the utilization of a fixed value or an adaptive tuning algorithm for the lumped uncertainty bound. The effectiveness of the proposed control schemes can be verified in numerical simulations.<br /