On the Control of Translationally Flexible Base Manipulators

This work considers the control of manipulators mounted on a translationally flexible base and extends a previous publication of the authors. The contribution is twofold. Firstly, based on the previously proposed coordinate transformation, a new control strategy is developed, which features two enhancements: The stiffness of the base is allowed to be nonlinear; A momentum-based strategy for vibration damping enables to avoid the feedback linearization, which was required to apply linear stability theory before. Secondly, the control strategies are evaluated in experiments for the first time. Experiments and simulations are used to validate the results and compare the two methods to related approaches.