A rigid-flexible manipulator may be assigned tasks in a moving environment
where the winds or vibrations affect the position and/or orientation of surface
of operation. Consequently, losses of the contact and perhaps degradation of
the performance may occur as references are changed. When the environment is
moving, knowledge of the angle α between the contact surface and the
horizontal is required at every instant. In this paper, different profiles for
the time varying angle α are proposed to investigate the effect of this
change into the contact force and the joint torques of a rigid-flexible
manipulator. The coefficients of the equation of the proposed rotating surface
are changing with time to determine the new X and Y coordinates of the moving
surface as the surface rotates