| The study reported in this thesis investigates the potential advantages of integrated design strategies for flexible manipulators that utilize a controller in the process of optimizing the structural design.;A clamped free beam model with torque inputs at the joints and disturbances at the link ends is considered in the investigation. A clamped mass beam model is also investigated. A proportional and derivative controller is utilized in the design process with several objective functions that incorporate weighted combinations of the mass of the structure, modal mass, modal stiffness, and the natural frequency of the rigid and flexible modes. The results show that the objective function, which minimizes mass and maximizes the product of the modal mass and the modal stiffness with appropriate weighting factors, gave the best dynamic performance. It was also shown, as would be expected, that the selection of the weighting factors is an important consideration since it can significantly influence the dynamic characteristics of the optimized system.;Although a two link tubular planar manipulator with a PD controller and assumed beam models for the links is considered in the optimization based on modal parameters, the reported approach can be extended to time domain optimization of multi-link spatial robots with complex structures designed to perform particular tasks. |
