Cooperative Fault-Tolerant Control for a Mobile Dual Flexible Manipulator With Output Constraints

This article discusses cooperative control of a mobile dual flexible manipulator system with asymmetric time-varying output constraints and actuator failures. The shift function and a barrier Lyapunov function (BLF) are used to guarantee output constraints when the initial states of the system violate the prescribed constraints. Moreover, an adaptive fault-tolerant control scheme is developed to deal with actuator failures, while suppressing system’s vibration and achieving cooperative operation. Finally, theoretic analysis proves the uniform bounded stability of the system and numerical simulation verifies the effectiveness of the proposed control method. Note to Practitioners—The purpose of this article is to develop a cooperative dual flexible manipulator system with performance limitations and actuator failures. The system can realize the task of stably grasping and moving a rigid object. The existing research on the grasping task of flexible manipulators only focuses on coordinated operation, which limits the application of the dual flexible manipulator system in practical engineering. To further study the problem, this article considers the output constraints and actuator failures of the dual flexible manipulator system in the actual process and proposes a cooperative fault-tolerant control framework. The control framework uses shift function and BLF to deal with output constraints and adopts adaptive technology to deal with actuator failures. In addition, the cooperative operation task of grasping object with dual flexible manipulators is realized. Simulation shows that this control strategy is feasible.