Force control of a flexible manipulator based on the measurement of link deflections

In the past decade, a considerable amount of research has been devoted to flexible manipulators, especially to their modeling, vibration control, inverse kinematics and inverse dynamics. When a flexible manipulator is set to an environmental constraint, force control is necessary to be implemented to complete the task. In this work, we apply a concise position/force control scheme to a spatial flexible manipulator, using lumped-parameter modeling. The equations of motion, including elastic deflection and contact force, have been obtained based on Hamilton´s principle. Force control has been realized, both in simulation and experimentally. A comparison between those results is also presented