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Study of Flexible Manipulator Systems: Web-based Virtual Facility for Modeling, Simulation, and Control

1 Introduction

In the engineering and technology arena, virtual facilities allow one to interact with a computer simulated environment that will provide experience with the operation and behavior of a real/imaginary engineering system with varying inputs and boundary conditions1, 2. A virtual facility can have two purposes: a) to facilitate the feasibility study of an engineering system while in the planning stage, and based on the study, designers can adjust the parameters during their final planning so the anticipated system can serve its purpose and b) to study the behavior and control of a complex engineering system for educational and research purposes without building the system. The development of these virtual facilities can involve expertise with complex mathematical solutions with tedious software developments and effective graphical user interface 3.

Considering the level of involvement, sometimes it is difficult for an individual institution to develop and maintain such facilities in terms of expertise and resources. To address this issue, with the advent of web and related technologies, it is possible to provide remote access to a developed virtual facility that will be housed at a central location. With this scenario, a group of experts can develop a virtual facility for an engineering system and make it available over the web from a remote server. Any change/modification of the developed facility needs to be done only within the server, which will allow a number of individuals or institutions to share their resources for a virtual facility. Otherwise it would have impossible to achieve this on individual basis. The lightweight flexible manipulators can be considered a complex system, and researchers/educators are trying to model and simulate these to develop effective controller designs 4, 5, 6. Toward this effort, a web-based virtual facility for flexible manipulators would be useful. This paper addresses the development of a web-based virtual facility for modeling, simulating, and controlling flexible manipulator systems.

2. Benefits and Challenges of Flexible Manipulators

Lightweight flexible manipulator systems offer several advantages in contrast to their traditional rigid counterparts: faster system response, lower energy consumption, relatively smaller actuators, reduced nonlinearity due to elimination of gearing, less overall mass and, in general, less overall cost 7. All these benefits attract attention for their use in various sectors of industry 8, 9. However, apart from space programs (due to strict payload regulations for a spacecraft), their use has not yet that popular.

A main factor for achieving the advantages of flexible manipulators is the reduction of weight. However, this reduction of weight to a certain level gives way to a natural loss of stiffness, allowing the manipulator to vibrate due to elastic deformation during its motion and thus increasing the duration for completing a given task cycle (pick-position-place). A promising approach to compensate for this setback is to incorporate into these manipulators more sophisticated control algorithms with an involved actuation and sensing network. A basis for

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Azad, A., & Mohammed, G., & Murtuza, M., & Rahman, M. A. (2008, June), Web Based Simulation Of Flexible Manipulator Systems Paper presented at 2008 Annual Conference & Exposition, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 10.18260/1-2--4060