Effects of tip mass and actuator inertia on the behavior of a flexible arm robot

There are some important parameters that must be taken into consideration in the design process of the actuator for a flexible single link robot. Among these important factors are the hub inertia and the proper tip mass (including the payload) for optimum performance of the flexible arm system. The main objective of the paper is to study the effect of the actuator inertia as well as the tip mass in the flexible hub torque through the solution of the inverse dynamics problem. For comparison, two reference trajectories; Gaussian velocity, and a polynomial profile are applied. The equations of motion are derived with the help of the extended Hamilton principle using the virtual link coordinate system and the pinned-pinned boundary conditions.