Sensing strategies and performance assessment for a flexible manipulator

Combination schemes of multisensor for a Kalman filter are applied and evaluated for modal estimation of a flexible manipulator. In addition to observability, the performance indices regarding the global estimate error covariance, the sensitivity to the initial estimate error, and the robustness to the round-off errors of the relative noise intensity between process and measurements, are utilized to evaluate the quality of the Kalman filters. The aim is to recognize the well-conditioned multisensor combinations for which Kalman filters achieve a specified level of design performance. The case studies for the assessment of the multisensor combination schemes are carried out for Kalman filters associated with various relative noise intensities. The useful guidelines for achieving the well-conditioned combinations of multisensors are presented