An approach to the minimum time control of a simple flexible arm

© 1983 ASMEPresented at the Winter annual meeting of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers; Boston - Mass., November 13-18, 1983: Control of manufacturing processes and robotic systems .To enable faster robot arm motion one might reduce the arm weight and use a minimum time control. Light arms will be flexible. A simple example of a light arm is a single beam, rotating about one end, and subject to bending. This paper models such a beam in modal coordinates, linearizes the model, and formulates the control according to an algorithm developed by Plant and Athans. This algorithm moves the system state to a hypersphere near the origin in minimum time. The objective of this research is to understand the nature of the optimal control to aid in formulating a more practical suboptimal control