Paper Authors

Abstract

NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract

Document: 2004--826

A MATLAB/SIMULINK BASED ENVIRONMENT FOR INTELLIGENT MODELLING AND SIMULATION OF FLEXIBLE MANIPULATOR SYSTEMS

Abul K M Azad*, M. O. Tokhi§, A. Pathania*, and M. H. Shaheed+ * Department of Technology, Northern Illinois University, IL-60115, USA. § Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering, University of Sheffield, UK. + Department of Engineering, Queen Mary, University of London, London, UK.

1. Introduction

Flexible manipulator systems are receiving increasing attention due to their advantages over conventional robot manipulators. The advantages include faster response, lower energy consumption, relatively smaller actuators, higher payload to weight ratio and, in general, less overall cost 1. Some of the current applications of such manipulators include spacecraft, remote manipulation and radioactive material handling in nuclear power plants. Due to their flexible nature, induced vibrations appear in the system during and after a positioning motion 2,3. This restricts their wide spread use in industry. A considerable amount of research work has already been carried out on the vibration control of flexible manipulators. However, a generic solution to the problem is yet to be obtained 4,5.

To formulate and implement an effective control strategy for efficient vibration suppression of the system, it is important to recognise the flexible nature of the manipulator and construct a mathematical model for the system that accounts for the interactions with actuators and payload 6 . Such a model can be constructed using partial differential equations (PDEs). The finite element (FE) and finite difference (FD) methods have also been utilised to describe the flexible behaviour of manipulators 7. The computational complexity and consequent software coding involved in the FE method is a major disadvantage of this technique 8. An alternative solution is to utilise intelligent techniques, such as genetic algorithms (GAs) and neural networks (NNs) for modelling of flexible manipulator systems 9.

The approaches indicated above have proved to be effective in modelling and simulation of such systems for test and verification of controller designs. However, to allow interactive and user friendly features, that are desired especially in computer aided teaching and research, be incorporated a modelling, simulation and control environment is developed in this work for flexible manipulators using Matlab and Simulink. To this end the authors have developed an interactive and user-friendly environment referred to as SCEFMAS (Simulation and Control Environment of Flexible Manipulator Systems) 10. As an on-going development process, the SCEFMAS environment is enhanced by the addition of intelligent modelling, a new menu driven user interface with GUI based facility, and the display of results within the GUI facility. Moreover, the environment is upgraded from Matlab 4.2 to Matlab 6.5. This paper describes these recent developments in SCEFMAS. The rest of the paper is structured as follows: Section 2

Proceedings of 2004 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright @2004, American Society for Engineering Education

• Citation

• Format
  • APA
  • APA - LaTeX bibitem
  • MLA
  • MLA - LaTeX bibitem
  • Bibtex
  • EndNote - RIS

Azad, A. (2004, June), A Matlab And Simulink Based Software Environment For Intelligent Modelling And Simulation Of Flexible Manipulator Systems Paper presented at 2004 Annual Conference, Salt Lake City, Utah. 10.18260/1-2--14016