Motion and vibration control of a flexible structure

This paper proposes an approach to the problem of simultaneous motion and vibration control of flexible structures. This complex control task is split up in two simpler tasks. A motion controller achieves the rigid-body motion of the slide with a minimal tracking error, while a vibration controller drives an additional actuator mounted on the flexible structure such that the vibrations, excited by the inertial forces, are damped out as quickly as possible. The potential benefits of this approach are demonstrated by numerical simulations and by experiments on a representative laboratory test set-up.status: publishe