Vibration suppression and zero reaction maneuvers of flexible space structure mounted manipulators

• Published in: Smart materials and structures Vol. 8; no. 6; pp. 847 - 856
• Main Authors: Yoshida, Kazuya, Nenchev, Dragomir N, Uchiyama, Masaru
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: IOP Publishing 01.12.1999
• ISSN: 0964-1726; 1361-665X
• DOI: 10.1088/0964-1726/8/6/312

This paper deals with vibration suppression control of a flexible space structure comprising a robotic manipulator arm. When the manipulator arm is operated without any special attention, the reaction of the arm may excite vibrations in the base structure. However, when the arm is operated under a control technique called 'reaction null space', the manipulator dynamics is totally decoupled from the base dynamics. Thus, no vibrations are induced into the flexible structure. Such manipulator operations are called 'zero reaction maneuvers'. On the other hand, the orthogonal complement of the reaction null space can be used to achieve maximum coupling with the base, in order to effectively damp the vibration energy in the structure out into the manipulator arm. Such operations are useful for vibration suppression control. This paper develops control laws for vibration suppression and zero reaction maneuvers using the reaction null-space concept, and examines the effectiveness of the control laws by experiments with a planar flexible base system. (Author)