Stability Analysis of Direct Strain Feedback Control of Flexible Robot Arms

This paper addresses control problems of flexible robot arms by using direct strain feedback method. The purpose is to make clear why direct strain feedback can damp out the vibration of the flexible arms satisfactorily. New findings involved in this paper are that the direct strain feedback introduces a class of differential operators which we call A-dependent operators, and that the closed loop system is described by an abstract second order differential equation on an appropriate Hilbert space with A-dependent damping operators. The existence, uniqueness, and stability of this abstract equation are presented and real-time control experiments are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness and limitation of direct strain feedbak.