Impedance control and gain tuning of Flexible Base Moving Manipulators using PSO method

New gains tuning and impedance control method were addressed for flexible base moving manipulators. Slow and fast dynamics of robot are decoupled using singular perturbation method. Then, using sliding mode control method, an impedance control law was derived for the slow dynamics. Combined control law was proposed comprising the impedance control law and a feedback control law for the fast dynamics. As fist time, we proposed a new online particle swarm optimization algorithm for gain tuning of impedance control at the contact moments of end effector and unknown environments. This proposed sliding mode impedance controller and online PSO were simulated for a flexible base moving manipulator. Model is composed of a 2 DOF planar manipulator and a single DOF moving base with flexibility. This controller provides desired position/force control with satisfactory damped vibrations especially at the point of contact. Also, all impedance control coefficients were tuned converged by proposed online PSO algorithm after minimum contact moments.