Vision based flexible beam tip point control

Because of the light weight and less wear and tear on components, the flexible beam has been and will continue to be an appealing option for civil and military applications. However, flexibility brings with it unwanted oscillations and severe chattering which may even lead to an unstable system. To tackle these challenges, a two-time scale controller is presented to track a desired tip point signal and at the same time mitigate the tip point vibration. To obtain more precise information of the tip point location and facilitate the easy extension to multiple-flexible-link problems, a camera is used to provide vision feedback in which the delayed vision signal is compensated by the state estimator and predictor. The controller is experimentally verified, and shown to exceed the performance of other tested controllers.