Reduction of disturbance effects and sustained oscillation using multi-sensor fusion in a flexible link system

In this work, a general set of routines for multi-sensor fusion applied to a flexible link control system to reduce the effects of disturbance and the sustained oscillation in steady state is proposed. Since disturbance signals are tend to be introduced to control systems, it is necessary to rely on multi-sensor fusion to improve control performance in spite of disturbance. Multi-sensor fusion for a control system is considered as a sequence of making decisions for a combination of sensor data to make a proper control input in uncertain conditions of disturbance effects on sensors and the system. The proposed method is applied to a typical flexible link control system in which reduction of oscillation is obtained using a pair of photo sensors at the tip of the link. Since environmental light conditions affect the control performance critically, an accelerometer is used in addition to the existing photo sensors to overcome the difficulties. Also, the magnitude of sustained oscillation in steady state can be reduced by multi-sensor data fusion of various degrees of sensor resolution.