A Simulink environment for simulation and control of flexible manipulator systems

The paper presents an investigation into the development of an environment for simulation and control of flexible manipulator systems using Simulink. A constrained planar single link flexible manipulator is considered. An interactive and user friendly environment incorporating a finite difference simulation of the manipulator, shaped torque inputs including bang bang, Gaussian shaped and filtered command is developed and implemented. Simulation results demonstrating and verifying the performance of the environment and the control strategies are presented and discussed.