Encyclopedia of Systems and Control DOI 10.1007/978-1-4471-5102-9_176-1 © Springer-Verlag London 2014 Flexible Robots

Mechanical flexibility in robot manipulators is due to compliance at the joints and/or distributed deflection of the links. Dynamic models of the two classes of robots with flexible joints or flexible links are presented, together with control laws addressing the motion tasks of regulation to constant equilibrium states and of asymptotic tracking of output trajectories. Control design for robots with flexible joints takes advantage of the passivity and feedback linearization properties. In robots with flexible links, basic differences arise when controlling the motion at the joint level or at the tip level