Control of vibrations for a parallel manipulator with flexible links — concepts and experimental results

A comprehensive control approach is presented to reduce the vibrations of a parallel manipulator with a kinematic loop and two flexible links whereof the longer one can show significant oscillations. The control objectives are end-effector trajectory tracking and active vibration control. The system is modeled as a flexible multibody system and exact feedforward control based on the full dynamic flexible multibody system is applied to improve the end-effector trajectory tracking performance. Furthermore, the effect of different position control concepts for the two linear drives, such as gain scheduling for the utilized cascade control and a model based friction compensation, on the movers themselves as well as on the end-effector are discussed, which can be conflicting. Experimental results are presented illustrating the achievable accuracy of the end-effector tracking for different trajectories while showing significant error reductions for a feedforward control based on an elastic model in contrast to a rigid one. Finally, a model based curvature controller is utilized which actively controls the occurring oscillations of the parallel manipulator. Here, a proportional controller as well as a linear-quadratic regulator are applied and the impact of an additional curvature control on the end-effector tracking performance is investigated.