Modelling and development of dynamic simulator for flexible parallel manipulator

This paper presents a dynamic simulator of a 2-DOF planar parallel manipulator with flexible links. The motivation of the work is to simplify the integrated design optimization framework for complex mechatronics system. Finite element modeling has been identified as the method to provide more accurate dynamic modeling of complex geometrical structures. However, the mere size of the multi-dimensional problems often hinders its incorporation in other optimization algorithm unless severe model reduction is performed. The goal of the current work is to demonstrate the fidelity provided by the proposed simulator and describe its place in the overall design framework for parallel manipulators. The simulator shows good agreement with an independent finite-element model and experimental results.