| Robot manipulators are widely used to help with dangerous and monotonous jobs. A study of the existing manipulators has shown that some of these manipulators are not efficient (in terms of power consumption) because of the weight of the arm and large payloads other manipulators have to handle. The efficiency of these manipulators can be increased by reducing the weight of the arm; however, that will complicate the dynamics of the system because of the possible onset of low frequency oscillations. Therefore, to increase the speed of these robots and preserve tracking accuracy, a thorough study of the dynamics and control of flexible robot arms are necessary. Efforts have been made to independently improve the dynamical models of flexible robot arms and the control schemes, but no integrated approach has been applied to the problem.; A variety of dynamical models are available in the literature ranging from simple fixed-free beam to a more complicated finite element model. Researchers often make simplifying assumptions, such as no cross-coupling, small deflections, rigid joints, and isotropic material when deriving the dynamical models for flexible robot arms in order to be able to formulate the control law. This thesis addresses modelling and end-point control of flexible manipulators. Timoshenko beam theory along with the assumed mode method are used to derive the equations of motion of the flexible manipulator.; The {dollar}mu{dollar}-synthesis control design technique is used to synthesize controllers for the flexible robot arm using the estimated errors from unmodelled dynamics and measuring devices. A goal of this research is to derive controllers that are robust to changes in the high frequency dynamics and modal frequencies and maintaining a high controller bandwidth for a fast response time.; The same process used to derive the dynamical model and the control law for the single-link flexible manipulator, is applied to a two-link flexible robot manipulator. Finally an experimental verification of the theory derived for the dynamics and control of the flexible manipulator is performed. |
