Experimental evaluation of evolutionary predictive input shaping applied to a flexible structure

This work reports the results of an experimental study, which has been carried out to evaluate the applicability of nonlinear model predictive control for the reduction of vibrations in flexible structures. Reference was made to a clamped flexible beam on the tip of which a controlled pendulum is attached. The control strategy consists of two stages: in the first one a PD controller is employed to ensure the accurate tracking of the pendulum position with respect to a reference shaped signal; in the second one the shaped trajectory is generated by a model based predictive controller. For the online nonlinear constrained optimization a new evolutionary algorithm is proposed. The results of some experiments are reported, comparing the performance of a pure feedforward scheme with others that employ either a continuous or an intermittent output feedback strategy.