Attitude control of a flexible planar space robot

Rigid planar space robot is represented as Caplygin system and its base attitude can be stabilized by means of geometric phase. However, in cases when flexible arms are used for control of base attitude, inherent resonance modes are excited and instability is resulted. In this study we propose a stabilized controller is synthesized as adaptive tracking control system convined with sliding mode control to track to the arm trajectories derived from the geometric phase of the Caplygin system. Usefulness of the proposed controller is demonstrated by numerical simulations and laboratory experiments.