Control System Design for a Flexible Arm

Abstract

In this thesis, we study the problem of real-time control of a flexible arm. We have investigated techniques for compensating the effects of friction and ripple torque. New software was written to use a Metrabyte Data Acquisition and Control board for the real time implementation. A controller-observer scheme was used together with integral feedback. In the design of feedback gains, a newly developed package called CONSOLE was used. After translating the continuous-time design to the discrete-system and before implementation, a package called SIMNON was used to do the simulation of the whole system and to explore the effect of different sampling rates. The experiments done so far imply that the schemes used here are sound for real-time control of flexible structures.