Following control of flexible manipulator

This paper describes a control strategy with flexible manipulator in case of the movable environment. In a pushing task of the movable environment, it is important to keep the stable contact without hunting. To realize such a motion, a flexible structure of the manipulator is useful. Also it is important to realize a following control of the desired force between the manipulator and the movable environment. In the proposed approach, the dynamical behavior of the environment is fed back by using the estimated reaction torque. This makes it easy to obtain the stable following response against the moving environment. Several numerical results are shown to confirm the validity of the proposed controller.